Windows Firewall and F-Secure

alsimmo

Hi all,

I've recently installed Server Security 15.11 on an old server (Windows 2008r2) from PM (version 15.30). After a few hours we've then realised that F-Secure has enabled the Windows Firewall which has caused an issue with the application as it was originally disabled.

As a solution, the workaround (which we should have done originally) was to open the correct ports in Windows Firewall to allow the application to communicate with clients.

I've upgraded numerous servers and haven't had this problem which are generally Windows 2012r2 or 2019. When deploying Server Security from PM, I've been excluding 'Firewall' from the installation gui so I can't understand why it's now enabling old servers. It could be possible that it was originally installed on the Windows 2008r2 servers though.

Does anyone know why the firewall was enabled even though in Windows it was previously disabled?

Are there any reports that can be run to show where the Windows Firewall is enabled and especially by F-Secure?

In the server Policy Domain in PM, 'Enable firewall configuration through Policy Manager' and 'Enable Windows Firewall' are enabled. Could this be the reason why this happened? Is it safe to disable both without causing issues to the servers?

Regards,

Daniel

MonikaL

Hi,

If you want Windows Firewall state shall not be changed, with the product installed, despite Windows Firewall is enabled/disabled on the Windows server, you can disable the setting "Enable firewall configuration through Policy Manager" via Policy Manager Console under Settings(Standard view) > Firewall.

This shall disable the product firewall integration with Windows Firewall.

However, you will still find the built-in F-Secure Firewall rules that allow the connection to the DNS & DHCP server, and also the F-Secure backend(including the Policy Manager Server, web update server, etc.). This is required for the product to continue to work.