Firewall blocking incomming

[gmdoran]

Hi,  I've been using a program called Strat-o-matic baseball for quite some time.  When using it wirelessly you need to have the port forwarding setup correctly for two people to be able to connect together and play.  For years it has worked flawlessly.  Yesterday however nobody could connect to me.  I noticed in the event logs that the IP address for the two people I tried to connect with it was blocked.  I have the program set up to allow full access but for some reason the firewall is blocking it.  Why would it all of a sudden flagg those IP's as "suspicious activity" and block them?  I'm assuming it will block anyone using that game from connecting.  I am going to delete the program from the list and try to let it re-establish itself.  It should ask me if I want to allow a "one time, full or block" when it sees the program try to access the firewall.  I'm not sure if it will or not though.  As I said I wouldn't even know it was being blocked if I had not looked into the logs and knew the IP address.

any reason why it started acting like this?  My firewall is also set to "let it decide" should I be setting it to "monitor"?

thanks for any help you can be.

[exbrit]

Similar occurrences have recently been reported elsewhere and we don't know the answers so I think it's best you go straight to Technical Support with this isse.  It's free by phone or online chat and linked under Useful Links at the toip of this page.

[gmdoran]

Ex Brit...just some more information.  Deleting the program exclusion didn't do any good.  I then edited the exclusion and turned off Net Guard(same screen as the Full Allow) that didn't let anything through.  So I just disabled the firewall all together and the program connected the two computers.

The IP address that is being blocked from my friends computer is : 173.171.14.210....another thing that is wierd is that immediately upon starting up the computer the log shows that IP address 161.69.12.221 is also being blocked and I think that is a McAfee site?

So it is clearly a firewall issue.  I also went into the Net Guard area and don't see any way to add an IP to it that would be trusted.

I have not had the chance to be in front of the computer long enough to contact tech support so I'm not sure  yet what they think.

thanks again

[exbrit]

Open Firewall and look in 'My Network Connections'.  Maybe add that IP there?

Play around with that and see if it helps.

[gmdoran]

Nothing so far has worked.  I spent two hours on the phone with tech support last night.  They looked at settings and they did a restore to defaults for the firewall.  That wiped out all the "rules/exceptions" for programs that were there.  What we(I) expected to happen was that my friend would try to connect to my computer and the firewall would see that sombb.exe had tried to access my computer and it should have asked me if I wanted to, allow once, full or block.  It didn't do that....the request on my friends end timed out....I opened up McAfee and looked at the security logs and his IP address was shown as blocked at the same time as he tried to access.  So....McAfee blocked the incomming call before it even had the chance to notify me and let me make the decision of allowing the program or not.

As soon as I turned off the firewall he tried to connect and his request came through and we connected.  The problem is that I'm wide open to the internet with no firewall protection.  Something has changed but I don't know what that would be.  I was hoping that a second level support would now be notified and they would take over but I don't think that happened.  I think they are now waiting on me to call again and go through level 1 support again to get to level 2.  Ex-Brit I know that you said others have reported similar issues but when talking to the tech you would not know that.

So what would you recommend now.  I hate the idea that I have to change to another security package.  I also know that in the past when McAfee has changed it's DAT file that they all of a sudden will start to quarantine .dll files from this game.  After placing some calls and sending in a few files they will do something with the DAT files that it stops seeing them as "trojans" and leaves them alone.  So I'm wondering if some update has now flagged either the 6501 port or something that McAfee believes is unwanted that this program uses.

frustrated beyond words as this is a progam I use frequently.

[exbrit]

Under Ports and System Services in Firewall did you try enabling the file sharing ones?

[exbrit]

Also if that machine's Firewall is set to stealth it will ignore all incoming requests except responses to queries originated on that machine.

[gmdoran]

Ex-Brit

Thanks for trying...Nothing has helped at all.  It is really strange.  I have helped numerous people setup the port forwarding on their router so that they can host using this program.  I've never had problems.  Only one person has had problems like I'm having now and I was convinced he'd done something to foul up his computer unknowingly.  I can understand his frustration now.  I've not done anything that I can think of.  There is definately something that McAfee is doing because a simple "off" to the firewall makes all the problems go away....but as I said, then I'm open to the world with no protections.  I can only hope that they find whatever is doing this and fix it in an update soon.  Problem is I'm not sure they are even working on it as I don't know how wide spread an issue it is.  All I know is that it is effecting both my machines...one running Vista and one running Win 7...one wirelessly connected and one wired.

[exbrit]

Make sure that Technical Support escalates this problem upwards, OK?

[exbrit]

I tell you what I can do.  I will send an email to a friend in support to see if he has some ideas.   I can't promise anything though.