Originally Posted by
hellsbrink
Then, Mike, since you are such a smartass you can explain why the other two computers with the same 3rd party firewall had no issues "speaking" to each other and why things would not work when the firewall was turned OFF (as in, programme closed down so it wasn't even running) on at least two computers.
Wasn't trying to be a smartass as you put it, more pointing out more ammo to my earlier and oft mentioned statement that 3rd party firewalls are more trouble than they're worth.
Anyway, since you asked, you need to consider network traffic is often 2-way and that within a dialogue between two computers there are 4 directions to check: Inbound and Outbound for each computer. Now, MS firewall reduces that complexity to simply inbound on each computer and is pre-programmed to 'know' how home networks and domains work. For instance, most problems i've seen with 3rd-party firewalls are because they block one or more ports associated with kerberos and whilst an initial domain join might work as the ports are opened for that temporary time, subsequently they're closed and the computers in question either chug to a halt or give issues similar to the ones you're reporting. Also, you need to understand that whilst the firewall might say it's disabled, it is usually facilitated by being a shim in the network stack or similar, so "disabled" in this context usually means "i'm going to ignore the majority of my ruleset but i'll still stay resident" and it's the resident portions which still give problems, sometimes defaulting to a "block all" state in the worst of cases.
Couple this with prompts to block things that really shouldn't be blocked given to users who don't know why, and that is why 3rd party firewalls are sometimes worse than the hackers they're designed to defend against.
Glad you've sorted it though.