Firewall settings for Brother network printers (e.g. 5250DN and 1870N)

I've recently switched to Vista (new laptop) and can't get my Brother laser
printers to work from behind the Vista firewall. I've set an exception to
let "File and Printer Sharing" pass through the firewall (as suggested on
the Brother website), but no joy. Both my printers (5250DN at home and 1870N
at office) work fine when I disable the firewall. Any idea what
programs/ports I have to set up?

As an aside, is there any way of finding out what the Vista firewall is
blocking? When I was using Outpost (still not available for Vista) it would
tell me what was trying to talk out and I could use this info to configure
the firewall. From what I've experienced with the Vista firewall, it doesn't
tell me anything useful (even in its Advanced Security mode flavor).

<Debbie.Croft@nospamforme.com> wrote in message
news:unWQj$lEIHA.3848@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...

> I've recently switched to Vista (new laptop) and can't get my Brother
> laser printers to work from behind the Vista firewall. I've set an
> exception to let "File and Printer Sharing" pass through the firewall (as
> suggested on the Brother website), but no joy. Both my printers (5250DN at
> home and 1870N at office) work fine when I disable the firewall. Any idea
> what programs/ports I have to set up?
>
> As an aside, is there any way of finding out what the Vista firewall is
> blocking? When I was using Outpost (still not available for Vista) it
> would tell me what was trying to talk out and I could use this info to
> configure the firewall. From what I've experienced with the Vista
> firewall, it doesn't tell me anything useful (even in its Advanced
> Security mode flavor).

Vista FW does tell you a lot if you enable its logging, use a text editor
and view the logs. It's not going to tell you what applications is doing
what, which application control and a whole lot of other things in 3rd party
PFW(s) solutions are snake-oil anyway, if you're leaning on that snake-oil
to tell you what's happening. If those printers you're talking about are
network printers on a network, then they are going to have an IP. If this is
true, then you should be able to set rules to let traffic for those IP(s) to
pass on all ports through the Vista's FW, and just be done with it. You
should be able to see those IP(s) being blocked in the logs if Vista is
blocking traffic from those IP(s).

The File and Printer Sharing are the same for any MS O/S, and a NT classed
O/S such as NT 4.0, Win 2k, and XP, which Vista is a NT classed O/S as well
uses 445.

Those are the rules that are set to open those ports, when the F & PS
exception is made or with a 3rd party PFW is configured automatically to
open the network sharing ports for a Windows O/S it is running with.


Those ports are being talked about in the article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/298804


You enabled to rules with the exception and the ports should be open. If
they are not open, then something else is going on.