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I've just installed Windows Server 2008 on a server and I'm able to connect through Remote Desktop but can't ping. Do I need to open an special port on the firewall to be able to ping a server?

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5 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

By default Windows 2008 does not respond to pings. To enable:

Administrative Tools

Windows Firewall with Advanced Security

Inbound Rules

File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request - ICMPv4-IN)

Enable Rule

You should now be able to ping your server from the LAN.

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What about IPv6? Won't someone please think of IPv6!?! – Mark Brackett May 8 '09 at 0:05
I can add that to allow ping from outside the subnet I had to enable "All profiles" for the rule, not only "public". – Zitrax Feb 13 '10 at 15:03
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Yeah. that is the most stupid goruping ever - File and printer sharing for ICMP ;) Got stumbled over that one, too ;) Everyone I tell that laughs. – TomTom Aug 17 '10 at 13:58
What is more dumb is that the rule is disabled for the Domain profile, but enabled for Public and Private profiles. Surely most Domain profiles are on networks with a higher existing level of security than those you might deem Private or even Public... – dunxd Feb 8 '11 at 12:36
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up vote 8 down vote

You will want to allow ICMP packets through. Ping doesn't use TCP, so there is no port to open.

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The fact that "ping doesn't use TCP" is a little misleading. Since there are other protocols that use ports, it's perhaps more useful to say "ping uses ICMP, which is a portless, layer-3 protocol, so you enable ICMP to allow ping, not open a port". Some firewalls allow you to filter message type, so you need to allow "echo request" and "echo response" to allow ping to work. – jj33 May 8 '09 at 2:05
er, "...to allow ping to work if you didn't want to otherwise allow all message types for some reason". – jj33 May 8 '09 at 2:06
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up vote 3 down vote

Enable ping through the Windows Firewall at the command line like so:

netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8

Apparently this has changed in Windows Server 2008 R2 and newer, to:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMP Allow incoming V4 echo request"
    protocol=icmpv4:8,any dir=in action=allow

That's.. uh... quite a mouthful.

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technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737845(WS.10).aspx has the list of all the values, search for "set icmpsetting" within the page. – Luke Quinane Jun 24 '09 at 1:33
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up vote 0 down vote

Pay attention to use the correct quotation marks. Some web sites replace the quotation marks by similar symbols which cause syntax errors. C.f. enter link description here

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up vote 0 down vote

Another way of fixing this:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMP Allow incoming V4 echo request" protocol=icmpv4:8,any dir=in action=allow
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