Activate Firewall special functions using a command line(Windows Vista, 7)

               The Windows Firewall can not only be confi gured through the Security Center but also through the prompt or batch script. You have already used this option on XP. But Microsoft has reportedly changed some commands with the more recent versions. What are the things you need to keep in mind?
               The control of the Firewall using the command line has changed from Windows Vista onwards. But the old commands also work on Windows 7. But Microsoft wants to change this. Thus, the best thing for you to do is to upgrade to the new commands. The advantage: this gives you additional configuration options.

               In Vista and Windows 7, the Firewall is controlled using ‘netsh’ in the ‘netsh advfirewall firewall’ context instead of the ‘netsh firewall’ earlier. Moreover, you have upgraded command options here. On account of the User Account Control, all actions from a command line must run with administrator rights. Type ‘cmd’ in the search field of the Start menu for starting, right-click ‘cmd.exe’ and select ‘Run as administrator’. You can save yourself some of the typing effort if you directly switch to the desired context. Enter ‘netsh advfirewall’ for this and press Enter. The prompt displays this latest context in case of further actions. You can always obtain help on entering a question mark and the ‘reset’ command helps in resetting all Firewall settings to standard values. You can activate and deactivate using ‘set current profile state on’ and ‘set current profile state off ’.
               Type ‘firewall’ in order to reach the ‘netsh advfirewall firewall’ context for configuring individual rules. You can use ‘add rule’ to define each authorization or block for a program or port. The syntax that it follows is a little more complicated but follows a systematic structure. The parameters ‘dir=in’ or ‘dir=out’ and ‘action=allow’ and ‘action=block’ must be specified in each case in order to specify the direction as in or out and the type of rule as allowed or blocked. Moreover, each rule requires a clear name that you can assign using the parameter ‘name=’Example of a name’’ and subsequently use again for accessing this rule. All other parameters depend on the concrete task. Here, you can use ‘program=‘C:\test\example.exe’’, ‘protocol=TCP’ or ‘localport=80’ for instance. An example of a complete command for opening Port 80 for the TCP protocol would then be as follows:
add rule name- ‘Port 80 off nen’ dir-in action-allow protocol-TCP localport-80
               The ‘add rule ?’ command provides help for all the rule options. Make sure that you always specify the complete context for the Firewall programming in scripts. All commands must start with the string ‘netsh advfi rewall fi rewall’.