Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Configuring the Windows Firewall for Advantage

I ran into an issue the other day when testing some sample code that I have been working on. I had been running all my tests from my development machine but I wanted to test from a different machine as well. Since all the data was on my development machine I simply copied the executable to another machine and ran it. No problem right?

As you may have guessed I did run into a tiny problem. I received a 6420 error and started my troubleshooting by verifying the path and connection settings. After doing that I quickly did a trace of the connection and saw a 6410 “Destination address unreachable” error, but the IP address was correct. So I decided it must be a firewall problem. After verifying that the firewall on the test machine was turned off I checked the settings on my development machine. In this case the firewall was active so I checked the firewall exceptions to make sure that I had a port configured for Advantage.

To get to the firewall exceptions tab you need to view the network connection properties and then the properties of the connection you wish to configure. From there open the advanced tab and click on settings under the Windows Firewall section.

 WindowsFirewall1

As you can see I already had an entry for Advantage but I had configured it to be a TCP/IP port. By default Advantage uses UDP over IP but clients can be configured to use TCP/IP communications. So in this case I simply added another entry so ADS can be used with either TCP/IP or UDP communications. I am using the default port (6262) so my new port is shown below.

WindowsFirewall2 

After configuring this port I was able to connect from my test machine and finish my testing. For more information about Advantage network communications see the Tech-Tip “Accessing Advantage over a Wide Area Network”.

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