I needed to open two ports on a large number of machines. Using the Windows GUI is just too time consuming. So I found out how to open the ports via command line, and then added those commands into a batch file that opened the ports, appended to the hosts file, and initiated an installer. This saved me a lot of time, and the less I deal with the XP GUI, the better.

netsh firewall add portopening type number name enable subnet

• type – TCP or UDP
• number – port number (e.g. 80)
• name – name to identify this exception in the firewall

For example, to open up port 80 on the subnet, you could run the command:

netsh firewall add portopening TCP 80 HTTP enable subnet

I’m sure this will come in handy again.