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I need to temporarily turn off the firewall on my Windows 7 work computer, but the firewall settings are all greyed out. Above them is a message saying "For your security, some settings are managed by your system administrator."

I have admin privileges on this machine. How do I work around this?

BlairHippo
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2 Answers2

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You are on a domain and your domain administrator has disabled this via Group Policy.

To fix this you have two legitimate options:

  • Open only the ports you need (if you have the privileges).
  • Put a request in to the IT department to disable it/open the ports for you.

There are other workarounds, however for something like the firewall I would STRONGLY recommend you do NOT use that work around and either do it one of the two correct ways I listed above. If you hack around the group policy you could get in trouble at work (possibly even legal repercussions if you work for a bank or a government agency or if you live in California)

Community
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Scott Chamberlain
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Firewall settings can also be defined via group policy. Either local group policies with the program gpedit.msc, or remotely via active directory on a domain controller.

Those firewall settings from group policy are also shown, but cannot be modified in the windows firweall settings.

The also cannot be seen in the expected place in rsop.msc. Instead they are there in Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Extra Registry Settings (at least this is where I see them in Windows 7). They are in a text string which is difficult to interpret, but at least rsop tell which group policy they are coming from.

Klaus Hartnegg
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