Firewall rulez!

If your program needs to add firewall rules, your installer should provide the option.

DO NOT rely on the person installing your application to know what needs to be done.

DO NOT ignore it and let Windows pop up the Security Alert, this one:

Not the user nor the administrator knows or cares what firewall rules your application requires. The user probably, preferably, don't even have permission to allow access.

A lazy application manager, one like me for instance, might even consider turning off the local firewall altogether if it get complicated enough.

A prime example is the Flexera LMFlex, a pretty common manager for floating licenses used by a wide range of applications such as Autodesk AutoCAD, Pitney Bowes MapInfo and Safe Software FME.

LMFlex does not configure the rules for you, it requires a range of ports to be open, uses random ports as default, and every dependent application is managed by a separate LMgrd.exe process.

I could write an entire post about LMFlex, and probably will, but for now I'll just sigh and turn off the firewall.

I don't have time for this, I have porn to discover.