Opening a firewall for a Windows service

Question

I have a C # service application that needs to be accessed externally by xml-rpc clients. It is hosted through an HttpListenerRequest; not IIS. (Cannot require the server to be turned on by IIS)

It works great with the client when the server firewall is turned off or the ports that the application uses are open. However, if I create a firewall exception to enable the application through its name; it cannot be reached from the client computer. (I tried both manually enabling the service and adding code to enable the application from my installer.)

The reason I want the application to be enabled; not ports, that ports can change. (My application checks the range of available ports in case the default ports are used). Looking around, it seems that any service that is not fully "self-organized" cannot be turned on by a firewall.

Does anyone know a workaround for this?

Answer 1

not sure about the syntax, but I think you should use netsh with something like this:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://www.contoso.com:80/MyUri user=DOMAINE\utilisateur listen=yes