Allow flexible control of file and printer sharing

If you use role-based administration:

  • You must have the Policy setting - firewall right to configure a firewall policy.
  • You cannot edit a policy if it is applied outside your active sub-estate.

For more information, see Managing roles and sub-estates.

If you want more flexible control of file and printer sharing on your networks (for example, uni-directional NetBIOS traffic), you can do the following:

  • Allow file and printer sharing on other LANs (Local Area Networks) than those in the LAN settings list. This allows NetBIOS traffic on those LANs to be processed by the firewall rules.
  • Create high-priority global rules which allow communication to/from hosts with the appropriate NetBIOS ports and protocols. We recommend that you create global rules to explicitly block all unwanted file and printer sharing traffic rather than let it be handled by the default rule.

To allow file and printer sharing on other LANs than those in the LAN settings list:

  1. Check which firewall policy is used by the group(s) of computers you want to configure.

    See Check which policies a group uses.

  2. In the Policies pane, double-click Firewall, and then double-click the policy you want to change.
  3. On the File and printer sharing page of the Firewall Policy wizard, select Use custom settings, and then click Custom.
  4. Clear the Block file and printer sharing for other networks check box.