Changing Advanced Firewall Rules in Vista

Yesterday we talked about viewing the current firewall rules, and today the time has come to see how these rules can be changed, using the advanced interfaced introduced in my previous article on this topic. Of course that if you simply allow or deny when the firewall asks you to decide what to do with a certain application asking to create a connection to the Internet, things work pretty well, but what if you block by mistake your email client, for example?

I'll go along with the scenery above, and show you how to change an existing rule. These being said, let's go!

- First of all, let's open the advanced interface of the Windows Firewall by pressing the Start Orb, typing "firewall" in the search bar, and then clicking the item called Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.


- In the window that opens, click on Inbound Rules or Outbound Rules, both located in the left pane.


- Right click an item from the list and choose Properties.

- In the General tab, you can change the action performed by the current rule, as you can see in the screenshot below.


- In the Advanced tab, the Interface Types settings allow you to have different options set for a certain program, depending on the network interface used (for example, you can block a certain program to connect to the Internet, but allow it to create connections on your local network).


- At last, using the Scope tab allows you to apply a certain rule only to specific addresses, both for your computer and the remote location.


Today, we covered another small part of the Windows Firewall topic, but there's still enough to go. Anyway, I'll leave this aside for a while and give you tips and tricks covering the entire Vista universe, because there's a lot to know...

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