In my two most recent Web Exclusive VIP articles, "Countdown to XP SP2: Forced Protection" (April 2004, InstantDoc ID 42496) and "Countdown to XP SP2: Dealing with ICF" (April 2004, InstantDoc ID 42497), I discuss the Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)—specifically, my initial reservations about the service pack's automatic enabling of Windows Firewall (the XP SP2 version of Internet Connection Firewall—ICF) and the tweaks you'll need to work around some of its behavior. Now that Microsoft has pushed back SP2's release date to later this year, I have more time to give you a quick overview of Windows Firewall's features.
XP SP2 will automatically turn on Windows Firewall, and (as I've mentioned) that behavior could give you some trouble. After all, the wisdom of enabling a software firewall on a system that's inside a corporate intranet is questionable. But the idea of turning on such a firewall on a system that's outside the office—one that's, say, connected to a coffee shop's wireless network, a hotel's high-speed Internet, or a home cable modem or DSL—isn’t questionable at all. So, how might you tell your XP laptop to turn on its firewall only when you take it out of the office? Windows Firewall makes that task easy. At startup, Windows Firewall checks whether your system is logged on to a domain. If so, Windows Firewall engages its domain profile; if not, Windows Firewall’s mobile profile kicks in. You can use these two profiles to give ICF a split personality of sorts. . . .
Register
