Cisco PIX Firewall and Windows File Server

[Rajesh Revuru]

Hello:

I have a Windows Fileserver running on Windows 2003 server. I placed this server outside the PIX firewall. We have our LAN in our inside network. Our almost all users in the LAN has problems accessing the file server. We are getting the follwoing error messages( I dont have exact error messages)

1. Server busy not responding

2. Disk is full

3. Filename doesnt exist or something.

Please anyone who had this problem, and resolved it please do leave some sugeestions.

Thanks

[tvanginneken]

Hi,

what port(s) did you open the firewall to allow the file sharing? Windows 2003 does not need netbios anymore to do file sharing, but it can still be used.

The following ports are associated with file sharing and server message block (SMB) communications:

• Microsoft file sharing SMB (with netbios): User Datagram Protocol (UDP) ports from 135 through 139 and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) ports from 135 through 139.

• Direct-hosted SMB traffic without a network basic input/output system (without NetBIOS): port 445 (TCP and UPD).

In the Windows tcp/ip setting of your NIC, you can enable or disable NETBIOS if you want.

If you have the correct ports configured on the PIX. You can try to turn on logging (to memory or to a syslog server) and see if any packets are denied or if there are errors. This should give you hint of what is going wrong.

Kind Regards,

Tom