Mastering Windows Group Policy

Creating a rule to allow inbound traffic

The Windows Firewall restricts inbound communications by default, which is a great thing. Our machines are almost always connected to the internet these days, so we need to do all we can to keep the bad guys out. What this means in practice, however, is that often when you have a legitimate need to make a remote connection of some sort to a laptop, server, or whatever, it will be denied by default. Sometimes, the firewall plugs in rules automatically. For example, when you enable RDP on a Windows Server, it automatically plugs an Inbound Rule into WFAS on that server to allow incoming port 3389 traffic, because Windows knows that it will be necessary to make successful RDP connections to your server. ...