Firewall – How to remotely disable Firewall on Windows XP

For a simple command line \ batch file:

netsh firewall set opmode disable

Or with PowerShell:

$firewall = New-Object -com HNetCfg.FwMgr
$firewall.LocalPolicy.CurrentProfile.FirewallEnabled = $false

Both work fine under Windows Vista. If you are still having issues then I'd dig further to ensure that you have the right permissions and that you are using core windows components to execute the script. I have a parallel install of PowerShell (used by the VMWare VI Toolkit) that throws exactly the same security exception you list above when I try to use it to disable the firewall but for the basic Powershell v1.0 installation it works fine.

to see if the firewall is running

> sudo /sbin/iptables -L        
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         
> sudo /sbin/iptables -t nat -L
Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

if you see anything else in the output except default policies that read ACCEPT then you have a firewall on