Question: I am using a firewall software on the computer that I am running your DS Manager / DS Explorer, there are some device servers that do not show up when the firewall software is running, how do I fix that?

Answer: Firewall software usually have various levels of configuration on a program-to-program basis. The DS Manager and DS Explorer require the configuration of different service's setting under the firewall software. The DS Manager relies on the rundll32.exe to communicate with the device servers and the DS Explorer relies on wscript.exe to communicate with the device servers.

Here, We will use Kaspersky Lab's Internet Security for our examples.

The easy way to configure the firewall is to make use of its pop-up prompts. What you need to do is to start up DS Manager or DS Explorer and the firewall software should prompt you for program access permissions.

Left images shows UDP access request for rundll32.exe and the right image shows the UDP access request for wscript.exe.

To allow for complete showing of all device servers on the network, under “Action” section please choose “Any activity” and then “Allow”. The reason that we do not just open the UDP access for specific devices is that there will be situations where the firewall software will per-determin that it is hostile/illegal and auto-block the requests without any prompt. This results in some device server will never be found by the DS Manager / DS Explorer.

Now that was the easy way to do it, but if you prefer to manually adjust the setting, then continue reading. First Open the Kaspersky Internet Security program and navigate to the “Anti-Hacker” functions. Click on the space within the “Status” section.

Under “Enable Firewall” click on the “Settings…” button.

Under “Rules for applications” you will see a long list of applications that currently have rules applied upon. Look for rundll32.exe and wscript.exe in the list.

If you do not see either of it inside the list, click on the “Add…” button and manually add them. Check to see if the applications are already in the list, if not then choose “Browse…” to manually point to the application. Those 2 files should reside under the Windows\System32\ directory.

Select the appropriate application and Add a new rule by pressing the “Add…” button.

Type in any text you want for the “Rule name” and make sure the “Rule Description” is the same as in the image below:

Click OK and then OK two more times to apply the new rule and your DS Manager and DS Explorer should work flawlessly now.

Please note, TCP connection does not affect DS Manager and DS Explorer, to ensure better security the “Allow Any TCP Activity” should be deleted if there are no other programs that relies on full access of the TCP protocol.