Unable to access or ping Windows 2008 server

After being bitten by this for the second time, I thought I should write a post for future reference. I had setup a brand new virtual machine and I wanted to access the SQL Server 2008 instance. Because of the firewall built into Windows all external connections are blocked – this means I cannot ping the machine, let along connect to the SQL Server instance running.

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Disabling the firewall isn’t a problem, in the control panel you simply set the option.

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Generally, this solves the problem. However, after doing this on 2008, I still couldn’t ping the machine.  After paying a bit more close attention, I found that the Windows 2008 Firewall has different profiles, each with their own firewall setting. While I had disabled the firewall for the domain, public and private where still active and blocking my connection.

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After disabling the firewall on both of those profiles, I could happily ping the machine and connect to the SQL Server Instance running.

2 thoughts on “Unable to access or ping Windows 2008 server”

  1. Ben – I noticed this problem when I recently set up a Hyper-V machine. Is there not a way of allowing ping’s without just turning off the whole Firewall? In other words just allowing through ICMP requests?

    Nice find though 🙂

    ChrisNTR

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