The XP firewall is "stateless" and doesn't try to inspect every packet. On one hand this means that it can't do the fancy decision making that ZoneAlarm and Sygate do. On the other hand, it doesn't have the performance issues under a lot of traffic that they do (so it works well for applications like Access Grid and Conference XP).
You can programmatically open & close ports for the Windows XP Firewall. The source code for how ConferenceXP does this is in the Firewall.cs file in the MSR.LST.Net.Rtp project (see http://www.conferencexp.net<http://www.conferencexp.net/> to download). For descriptions on how the Windows XP Firewall works and how to program it, see the documentation on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com<http://msdn.microsoft.com/>). There's a URL to use Google to search MSDN for Firewall documentation & APIs & sample code: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=site%3Amsdn%2Emicrosoft%2Ecom+firewall Hope this helps... Todd Needham Manager, Research Programs Group Microsoft Research http://research.microsoft.com _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Rosenthal Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 11:07 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: [AG-TECH] Firewalls for the AG Hello, I'm creating an all-in-one WinXP node and we're having some trouble with the firewall. I've tried ZoneAlarm and Sygate, but they both seem to hog the CPU when there's a lot of multicast traffic. I haven't been able to configure the WinXP firewall to allow multicast traffic. What firewall are you using with WinXP and how well is it working with the AG? I appreciate your comments. Thanks, Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chris Rosenthal Phone: (312) 996-3002 Email: [email protected] Electronic Visualization Laboratory University of Illinois - Chicago
