Windows Update & uTorrent

Hello, I'm having a few problems getting these two to work with ESS firewall.


a) uTorrent. I had this working before, but I recently upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate and I'm having trouble remembering exactly what rules I had to make to get it working correctly.

uTorrent is fairly popular and I'm hoping someone here knows the most secure way to get uTorrent working without completely allowing connections with utorrent.exe (which would work, but kind of defeats the purpose of the firewall).

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b) Windows Update. As I said I recently upgraded to Windows Vista and unlike XP, Windows Update apparently is run through a program rather than a web page so I need to allow it access. The only way I've found so far is to completely allow connections with svchost.exe, but as I said before, kind of defeats the purpose of the firewall.

According to the Windows Help, it says I need to add these websites to my firewall exceptions list:

http://*.update.microsoft.com

https://*.update.microsoft.com

http://download.windowsupdate.com

However, I'm pretty sure I can't use domain names like those in ESS, only IP addresses (which isn't very useful since it's damn near impossible to find and unblock every IP address used with Windows Update). So I'm a bit stumped.


I appreciate any help you guys can give.

 

utorrent requires you to open tcp port in (6881) (unless you changed your port

and tcp outgoing you best allow all.


as for windows update
svchost.exe allow tcp ports 80 & 443

 

Okay cool, thanks! They seem to be working well now.

 

With XP (and it should be the same with Vista) , when an automatic update is started , a pop-up from ESS will appear if you use Interactive mode asking for permission to allow incomining connection for svchost.exe (Microsoft publisher) . Allow it and place a check to Remember the rule