SUPPORT.md

Support

This document provides information on how to get support with Windows Firewall Ruleset and anything related such as networking, security, privacy, troubleshooting and reporting issues.

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• Support
  • Table of Contents
  • Documentation
  • Reporting a problem or bug
  • Reporting security or privacy issue
  • Suggesting a feature or information
  • Starting a new discussion
  • Customization
  • Legacy support
  • Checking for updates
    • Using GitHub Desktop app
    • Manual release download
    • Manual beta download
    • Using git command
    • Which update method is the best

Documentation

Inside docs directory you will find useful information not only about this project but also general information on how to troubleshoot firewall and network problems, or to gather other relevant information.

It might answer some of your questions, for example Monitoring Firewall provides instructions on how to monitor firewall in real time.

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Reporting a problem or bug

To report bugs or functionality issues please open new issue and provide relevant details as outlined in Get started under Bug report.

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Reporting security or privacy issue

If there is security or privacy issue please refer to SECURITY.md

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Suggesting a feature or information

You are most welcome to suggest new rules or improvements for existing rules, scripts or documentation.

To make a suggestion please try to abide to notices below:

To suggest new rules or changes to existing rules if possible provide some documentation or links (preferably official) for your rule suggestion so that it can be easy to verify these rules or changes don't contain mistakes.
ex. for ICMP rules you would provide a link to IANA with relevant reference document.

To contribute your own already made rules, it is desired that each rule contains good description of it's purpose, when a user clicks on rule in firewall GUI she\he wants to see what this rule is about to easily conclude whether to enable/disable rule or allow/block network traffic.
If possible, the rule should be specific and not generic, that means specifying protocol, IP addresses, ports, system user, interface type and other relevant information.

To suggest other code changes or anything related to this project it's as well desired to provide some links, screenshots or anything which could better present your suggestion.

If you lack some of the details, no problem but please try to collect as much information as possible.

To actually make a suggestion please open new issue and provide relevant details as outlined in Get started under Feature request.

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Starting a new discussion

If you have random questions that don't fit anywhere else or you just want to say something then
you're most welcome to open new discussion in Discussions

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Customization

If you would like to customize how scripts run, such as force loading rules and various defaults then visit Config\ProjectSettings.ps1 and there you'll find global variables which are used for this.

If you would like to customize code or add more firewall rules to suit your interests then first step is to set up development environment and learn about best practices used by this repository all of which is explained in CONTRIBUTING.md

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Legacy support

For information on how to make use of this firewall on older Windows systems such as Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 see Legacy Support

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Checking for updates

Just like any other software on your computer, this firewall will go out of date as well, become obsolete, and may no longer function properly.

This repository consists of two branches, master (stable) and develop (possibly unstable).
The "develop" branch is where all updates directly go but updates are not actively tested, so it's work in progress, unlike "master" branch which is updated from develop once in a while and not before all scripts are thoroughly tested on fresh installed systems, which is what makes master brach stable.

If you want to experiment with development version to check out new stuff, switch to "develop" branch and try it out, however if it produces errors, you can either attempt to fix problems or switch back to "master".

There are at least four methods to be up to date with this firewall, each with it's own benefits:

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Using GitHub Desktop app

This method is similar to git command, but instead you'll use a graphical interface which you can get from here: GitHub Desktop

The benefit of using GitHub Desktop is that you easily see code changes on you desktop for each individual update.

To use it you will need github account and a fork of this repository in your GitHub account.

To configure GitHub Desktop see GitHub Desktop Documentation or search for some tutorial online.

Manual release download

This method requires you to simply download released zip file which can be found in Releases, this is always from "master" branch

Manual beta download

This method is good if you want to download from "develop" branch, to do so, use the branch button here on this site and switch to develop branch, next use Code button and choose option to either clone or download zip file .

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Using git command

This method is similar to GitHub Desktop above but good if you need specific git features.
In addition to two mentioned requirements for GitHub Desktop you will also need git and optionally (but recommended) SSH keys

Follow steps below to check for updates once you installed git and cloned your own fork:

• Right click on Start button in Windows
• Click Windows PowerShell to open PowerShell
• First navigate to directory where your instance of Windows Firewall Ruleset instance is, for example:
• Type: dir to list directories, cd SomeDirectoryName to move to some directory or cd .. to go one directory back
• Type: cd WindowsFirewallRuleset to move into WindowsFirewallRuleset directory

The following two sets of commands are typed only once for initial setup:

1. If you cloned your fork with SSH then run the following command:

   git remote add upstream [email protected]:metablaster/WindowsFirewallRuleset.git

2. Otherwise if you cloned your fork with HTTPS run:

   git remote add upstream https://github.com/metablaster/WindowsFirewallRuleset.git

Next two sets of commands are typed each time you want to check for updates:

1. To get updates from master branch run:

   • Type: git checkout master
   • Type: git fetch upstream
   • Type: git merge upstream/master

2. Otherwise to get updates from develop branch run:

   • Type: git checkout develop
   • Type: git fetch upstream
   • Type: git merge upstream/develop

For this to work, you need to make sure your working tree is "clean", which means you need to save and upload your modifications to your fork, for example:

cd Path\To\WindowsFirewallRuleset
git add .
git commit -m "my changes"
git push

You can switch from one branch to another with git in PowerShell as many times as you want and all files will be auto updated without the need to re-download or re-setup anything.

For more information on how to use git see git documentation
There are also many great tutorials online to learn how to use git.

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Which update method is the best

If your goal is to just get updates then GitHub Desktop is the best, otherwise if your goal is firewall customization, using git command would be more productive because it offers specific functionalities that you might need.

You can have both setups in same time and use them as needed in specific situation.
There is no benefit with manual zip download in comparison with git or GitHub Desktop.

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