27May Allow PING requests to reach Windows Vista
In Windows XP SP2 it was a pretty simple case of configuring the security/firewall rules for a selected network interface so that ICMP Echo (PING) requests would be allowed to pass through the firewall. ICMP Echo requests are a pretty standard way of seeing if a machine is up and running … depending on your configuration of course. In Windows Vista the way to allow PING requests is a bit different.
In Control Panel there is still the option for ‘Windows Firewall’ but this isn’t the one you want. You need to navigate to Administrative Tools and open the control panel applet called ‘Windows Firewall with Advanced Security’ - when it’s open, select ‘Inbound Rules’ from the list of options on the left. You will be presented with a screen similar to the following (yours will almost certainly have a different set of existing Inbound rules).
Select ‘New Rule…’ from the options on the right and choose ‘Custom’ as the rule type.
Click ‘Next’ then choose to apply the rule to ‘All Programs’.
Click ‘Next’ and select ‘ICMPv4′ as the protocol type.
At this point you can either select ‘Next’ or you can click the ‘Customize’ button and restrict the new inbound rule to specific ICMP connections (for this example you’d obviously want to select ‘Echo Request’). For example:
At the next screen you can choose which IP addresses to match the new rule to. This part is pretty important if you’re creating a rule that will deal with anything public-facing or if you are working in a secure/data-sensitive environment. For this example we’ll leave the IP address lists set to ‘Any IP address’.
Click ‘Next’ and set the action for the rule to ‘Allow the connection’.
Click ‘Next’ and select the profile you want this rule to apply to. For home machines you’ll usually want to select this to ‘Private’ so that only people on your internal network can send echo requests to the machine in question.
Click ‘Next’, name your new rule then enter a more detailed description if you want to.
Click ‘Finish’ and you’re done! Assuming there are no other rules or devices in place that can stop ICMP Echo (PING) requests, you should now be able to PING the machine you applied the rule on.