By default in Windows Server 2019 the Windows Firewall is configured to drop all inbound ICMP traffic. This includes echo requests which are used by the ping command, which can make network troubleshooting difficult.
In this guide we will cover how to allow ping through Windows Firewall in Windows Server 2019.
Rather than manually configuring Windows Firewall rules individually on each server, we can instead configure firewall rules for multiple profiles using group policy, allowing us to roll them out to a group of computers at once.
In this example we’ll be working with Windows Server 2016, however the steps are very similar in previous versions of the Windows operating system.
Instead of manually configuring the same Windows Firewall rules on many different servers, we can import and export Windows firewall settings to transfer them between different servers.
We can also import the firewall rule policy file into a Group Policy Object (GPO) to apply it automatically throughout a whole domain.
In Windows Server 2016, Windows Firewall is enabled by default. This allows all outgoing traffic to any destination or port, but limits incoming traffic based on specific rules. We’ll cover how to configure Windows Firewall with Advanced Security by demonstrating how to open it through both the GUI and PowerShell, followed by a demonstration of how to create a custom firewall rule.