Configuring the Windows XP SP2 firewall to work with the Circumventor

Bennett Haselton

If you have been brought to this page, you probably have the Windows XP SP2 firewall enabled on your computer, and it is preventing the Circumventor from working. In order to make the Circumventor work on your computer, you must do ONE of the following two things:

Option 1 -- add an "exception" for port 443 (the port that the Circumventor uses)

If you want to run a Circumventor but also leave the firewall turned on, you have to add an exception so that the firewall won't block external machines from connecting to the Circumventor.

To do this:

1. Go to Start Menu->Settings->Control Panel, and double-click "Windows Firewall".
2. Switch to the "Exceptions" tab. You should see a list of "programs and services"; there may be some programs already listed.
3. Click the "Add Port" button. A new dialog box titled "Add a Port" will appear.
4. In the "Add a Port" dialog box, type "Circumventor" on the "Name:" field and type "443" in the "Port:" field.
5. Click "OK" to close the "Add a Port" dialog box.
6. "Circumventor" should now be listed in the Exceptions list. You can click OK to close the Windows Firewall dialog box.

Option 2 -- turn off the firewall (not recommended)

To do this, go to Start Menu->Settings->Control Panel, and double-click "Windows Firewall". If the firewall is currently set to "On", switch it to "Off".

If you do this, you might get a warning message saying that turning off the firewall is not safe. Whether or not this is true, is a matter of some controversy (a firewall doesn't do anything to stop most kinds of attacks that can actually harm your computer), but our lawyers would probably tell us we should have this warning here. If we had lawyers.