Windows Firewall is a very useful tool that comes with your Windows system. It can help you find and block some suspected ports and programs that can be harmful to your computer. For some reason, you may want to know if your Firewall is blocking something. In this MiniTool post, we will show you how to check if Firewall is blocking a port.
Windows Firewall is a Windows built-in tool that can be used to filter network data transmission to and from on your Windows computer. It can also be used to block suspicious and harmful programs. At times, the Firewall may block some ports or programs accidentally.
When you encounter some issues like high ping in games, you can go to check whether the game is blocked by Firewall or whether Firewall is blocking a port.
But how to check if Firewall is blocking a port or a program? In this post, we will show you some guides on how to check if your Firewall is blocking something.
How to Check if a Port Is Blocked by Firewall?
You can check your Firewall blocks which ports by using Run or Command Prompt. Here are two guides:
Check Blocked Ports in Firewall via Run
1. Press Win+R to open Run.
2. Type control and press Enter to open Control Panel.
3. Click Administrative Tools.
4. Double click Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security to open it.
5. Go to Action > Properties.
6. Click the Windows Defender Firewall Properties link.
7. Switch to your preferred profile (here is Domain Profile in this example) and then click Customize in the Logging section.
8. Open the dropdown menu for Log dropped packets and select Yes.
9. Remember the path in the Name section. Or you can directly copy the path.
10. Click OK to save the change.
11. Open File Explorer and then go to that path. The path looks like %systemroot%system32LogFilesFirewall.
12. Open the log file which is named as log. Then, you can check for the blocked ports in the log file.
Check Blocked Ports in Firewall via Command Prompt
- Use Windows Search to search for cmd.
- Right-click the first result and then select Run as administrator.
- Type netsh firewall show state and press Enter.
- Then, you can see all the blocked and active ports in your Firewall.
Then, how to see if your Firewall is blocking a program? We will introduce one method in the next part.
How to Check if Windows Firewall Is Blocking a Program?
You can check which program is blocked by your Windows Firewall in the tool itself. It is very simple to do this job:
1. Use Windows Search to search for Windows Firewall and then select Windows Defender Firewall from the search result.
2. Click Allow an app or feature through Windows Defender Firewall from the left list.
3. In Allow applications, you can see the allowed programs are checked and the unchecked ones are blocked by Windows Firewall. If you want to unblock an application, you can click the Change settings button in the top-right side and then check your wanted application. After that, you can click the OK button on the bottom to save the change.
Those are the methods on how to check if Firewall is blocking a port or a program. You can just use one way to help you out.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Stella has been working in MiniTool Software as an English Editor for more than 7 years. Her articles mainly cover the fields of data recovery including storage media data recovery and phone data recovery, YouTube videos download, partition management, and video conversions.
