The other question to ask is whether this really belongs in the
installation at all. The line between installation and configuration is
sometimes a huge gray area, but this could be seen as application
configuration that doesn't need to be in the installation.
I've heard suggestion that where ports are concerned it might be better
if the app opens and closes them itself if necessary, which has the
benefit that the ports aren't sitting there open when the app isn't
running.
And what happens if the user installs the app without the Windows
firewall enabled and then enables it later? Or switches from a 3rd-party
firewall to the Windows one? Or upgrades from Windows 2000 to XPSP2 with
your app installed? The point I'm making here is that it might be better
to have a standalone exe that configures the firewall for your product
that can be run another time if necessary. Perhaps put a shortcut on the
Start menu and have the user explicitly run it so there's some awareness
that the firewall has been altered and it's not masked by the
installation. Either way, the idea here is to get away from the notion
that the only way to configure the application's firewall settings is
during the installation.
Phil Wilson
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob
Mensching
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 11:01 AM
To: Levi Wilson
Cc: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Set firewall exception
Short answer is, "No."
Medium answer is "Just launching netsh would not be sufficient to
correctly install, uninstall, rollback, repair and patch Firewall
exceptions."
Why? Well there are a number of issues to think about:
What happens if the user hits cancel (or something actually fails in
your install?) after your netsh.exe CustomAction executed? How do you
rollback, and you want to rollback to the previous exception if there
was one. There is rollback on Uninstall too (to put it back the way it
was). And during uninstall, how do you handle the case that two
different products may install the same firewall exception?
Lots of tricky problems to solve in there. I encourage you to take a
look at the WiX CustomActions sometime. I'm actually working on some
bugs in there where rollback does the wrong thing. Check out the oldest
open WiX v2 bugs.
CustomActions that modify machine state are non-trivial programming
exercises. Please, be aware of that before you write one... and if you
do write one consider offering it back to the community so nobody else
has to go through the trouble again. That's how the IIS, SQL, User,
Certificate, FileShare, PerformanceCounter, MSMQ, COM+ stuff all came to
be.
From: Levi Wilson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 10:43 AM
To: Rob Mensching
Cc: David Thielen; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Set firewall exception
Couldn't you just do a ShellExecute() on "netsh.exe" with the command
line of something like "firewall add allowedprogram
\"c:\\myprogram.exe\" ENABLE" as the parameter? Then you can have
another one ("netsh firewall delete etc.") that removes it upon
uninstall. Wouldn't that work?
On 1/16/07, Rob Mensching <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
How would you the "netsh firewall" command back? Also, what if two
installs both install the same firewall exception? How would you
reference count the firewall exception?
Writing CustomActions that modify machine state is rarely an easy task.
Transactions (even compensating transactions) are hard things to get
right.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Levi
Wilson
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 10:33 AM
To: David Thielen
Cc: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Set firewall exception
It probably wouldn't be hard to do a Custom Action to do such a thing.
You could do a "netsh firewall" command to do it.
On 1/16/07, David Thielen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi;
Is there a WIX command to set an exception in the Windows firewall? If
so, what is it? And can it be set for a program we are not installing
(winword.exe)?
Thanks - dave
David Thielen
www.windwardreports.com
303-499-2544 x1185
Cubicle Wars - http://www.windwardreports.com/film.htm
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