how to open ports on firewall

[Wildflower]

Hello, I am a newbie-obviously. I need to open the ports on my windows firewall and don't understand the prompt it gives me.

With the windows firewall, when I attempt to open the Ports 2078 (SSL) or 2077 (non-SSL) as directed by Hostmonster it asks for me to:

specify a custom list, type a list of IP addresses, subnets or both, separated by commas.
- any computer (including those on the internet)
- My network (subnet) only
- custom list

how do I answer?

Thankyou!

[shadmego]

The built-in Windows Firewall only blocks traffic in one direction, which is in the inbound direction. That means it can only be set up to block traffic originating from outside of your local computer. The Windows Firewall does NOT block any traffic originating from your computer.

For this reason, you should allow communication from any port you wish only from that computer with which you wish to communicate with.

For instance, you want to use 2078 or 2077, presumably for webdisk, to communicate with your webserver. I would, if it were me, only allow your web server ip address to communicate with your computer on those ports. That means you have to know the IP address associated with your web site.

There are several ways to find this out.

1. You can log into CPanel and look on the left for the IP address of the server hosting your web site.

2. You can use the Windows command prompt to ping your website, which will resolve the domain name to the ip address

3. You can use the Windows command prompt to do a trace route (command is tracert) to your web site. This will also resolve your web site into its IP address.

You can also bypass this and allow any computer to communicate with yours on the ports associated with webdisk, but I DO NOT recommend this because it opens a HUGE security hole into your computer.

~regards, and welcome to the Community!

[johny]

Try out this manual to open ports, it is very detailed and i think there is no way you can get confused with this one, really cover everything..