Open a range of ports on Windows Firewall

Needed to open a big range of ports on Windows Firewall on one of my web boxes. Via the GUI you can only do one port at a time. But run this at the command prompt to add a range:

FOR /L %I IN (5001,1,5201) DO netsh firewall add portopening TCP %I "Passive FTP"%I

This opens ports 5001 to 5201, and names them 'Passive FTP'.

Found this here.

Oh, takes time, like a port or two a second, so if you have a wide range it's going to take some time.

Comments

[Jiggie]

Hey,
I'm having trouble with your command prompt solution and this is whats happening:
I copy your solution:
FOR /L %I IN (6881,1,6999) DO netsh firewall add portopening TCP %I "Passive FTP"%I
I paste it in to command prompt and I see it working on each individual port but it says:
"netsh is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."

and doesn't open them and when I go to my firewall exceptions they are not their so please help me and I'm not particularly great with technology so please bear with me
Thanks a lot

[David Eedle]

Hi Jiggie

NETSH is the program that's doing the actual opening of the ports. By the sound of things it's not in the default system directory. I would check:

C:\WINDOWS;
C:\WINDOWS\system32

And see if you can find it (maybe just search whole machine).

If you locate it, then reference it directly with the path to the program file, for example:

FOR /L %I IN (6881,1,6999) DO C:\WINDOWS\netsh firewall add portopening TCP %I "Passive FTP"%I

Kind regards...David

[jang]

Very useful thank you for posting this!

[Justin]

Super helpful, thanks!

[John]

big help, thank you!

[Bart Duncan]

To open a range of ports you don't need to add one rule per port - you can do it with just one rule. E.g. this will open 64000-64005 TCP inbound:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="My Port Range Rule" dir=in protocol=tcp localport=64000-64005 action=allow

[Daniel]

This was very useful and saved me alot of work, thanks alot :)