Opening a Firewall Port

The firewalls on Windows and various other operating systems are created to protect devices from undesired network traffic. They can protect end-user devices from threats which can range from an undesired new host surfing on the network, to data loss, or even theft via data mining programs. This data might involve classified information from the company or money transactions (usually encrypted, but still decipherable). This means that leaving the firewall off is a very real danger as it’s a major part of network security; it is basically the access list of the computer for outside sources.

Configuring the Ports

Step 1: Press the Windows key on your keyboard to access the Windows start menu.

Step 2: Open Windows Control Panel, or search for it in the start menu using the search feature.

Step 3: Select System and Security, and then navigate into the Windows Defender Firewall menu.

Step 4: On the left side of the screen, please click on Advanced settings. The “Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security” window will display for you.

Step 5: On the left side of the screen select “Inbound Rules”.

Step 6: Select “New Rule”, which opens the new inbound rule wizard for creating port exceptions.

Step 7: You will then be presented with the option to select a rule type, choose the “Port” option. This is the most effective choice for us, since SuperSalon and many of it’s peripheral services use various ports to function.

Step 8: Click next, and you will be asked to choose if the rule you are making will be applying to TCP or UDP, select the “TCP” option, this is for the segment type (OSI layer 4).

Most commonly configured ports:

80 (Apache for the Primary/Replica and Kiosk system).
3306 (MySQL).
443 ,5003, 550, 8580, 10009, 8080, 3306, 8001 I have recommended to open these ones from Tsys agents.
15583,8000, 22 (Aurus data traffic, based on the wiki)

Step 9: The second section of this menu will ask you to either apply the rule to all ports available, or to specify which ports you’d like. Tip: You can enter multiple ports here to allow them TCP access in 1 clean rule, so in some troubleshooting settings you may be excepting ports 80 and 3306, you can enter them both here. Click next after you’ve entered your preferred settings.

Step 10: On the next menu, you are given various options on how you’d like the firewall to treat the port exception you are creating. Potentially, you could block an unwanted port completely here, but in general you will be allowing connection through a port for a backdoor or for peripheral hardware/software. Click next.

Step 11: After specifying your exception conditions, the next menu will ask you under which types of networks the rule should be active or inactive. Again in this step, you will generally be selecting all options available to allow access to the port you’re opening since that’s the desired outcome. Click next.

Step 12: Specify a name for your port exception that aptly describes what it will be doing, this can be very helpful for another technician diagnosing a network, firewall, or port exception issue on the POS you’re working on.

Step 13: The next few steps you will be performing here are to repeat steps six through thirteen again, but on step nine you need to specify UDP this time, instead of TCP as before. Now create outbound rules on the menu in step five for both TCP and UDP.

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