Opening A Port On The Windows 7 Firewall

With the Window XP/Vista firewall, opening a particular port (i.e. 80 for HTTP, 1433 for SQL, etc.) was very straightforward. With Windows 7, however, the process is totally different and, initially, not very intuitive. So if you have the need to open a particular port on Windows 7, just follow these steps:

Open the Windows 7 Firewall.
Click the option for Advanced Settings on the left.
When the advanced options appear, select Inbound Rules from the left.
Now click New Rule from the right.
In the Wizard, select the option to open a Port. Click Next.
Finally configure the port number(s) to open and apply your settings.

I’m not exactly sure why this was changed in Windows 7 as the previous interface was quite easy to use. Regardless, if you ever need to do this, you now know how.

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http://patscompservices.blogspot.com Patrick Dickey
I think the reason that you have to go through so many steps now is that with Windows 7, Microsoft changed their firewall to an IPSec based firewall.
They also improved it from just an outbound blocking firewall (in Windows XP) and a limited inbound/outbound firewall (Windows Vista) to a more-featured firewall.
I actually wish they would backport the IPSec based firewall to XP/Vista/2003 (especially their Home Server line), so I would have a more robust solution available.
Have a great day:)
Patrick.

Jason Faulkner
You are probably right. The interface looks somewhat similar to their ISA Firewall product.
I am still surprised they would go with this type of interface for a consumer level product considering it is much more difficult to use compared to the the previous versions.