I am running in to major issues trying to enable some exceptions on Windows Firewall using the netsh commandline utility on Windows Vista. My aim is very simple. I need to enable some exceptions -- one of them being allowing inbound connections on port 80 on a local intranet server. So there is this exception called "World Wide Web Services (HTTP)" that can be checked to achieve my objective. Doing it like this: c:/> netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="World Wide Web Services (HTTP)" new enable=yes via the commandline yields an error saying no such rule exists ("No rule matches the specified criteria"). Replacingthe above rule namewith "Remote Desktop" (just for testing purposes because that is one of the examples given in a microsoft support website here: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/cb96fb93-d6b1-4b8f-aeba-63a6f4cfce761033.mspx?mfr=true) doesn't work either. What am I doing wrong?

Hi, Thank you for the post. I performed lots of tests regarding the command, as Remote Desktop is a group, the command should be: netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Desktop" new enable=yes. Additionally, if you would like to set an individual rule (but not a group), the command should be: netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name=. For example, netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="Remote Desktop (TCP-In)" new enable=yes. Hope it helps. Sincerely, Joson Zhou Microsoft Online Community Support