windows-7xampprouterwindows-firewallmcafee

Windows 7: How to configure XAMPP / Windows Firewall / McAfee / private network router to allow incoming external HTTP/HTTPS connections?

I have been trying to follow this brief tutorial to enable external HTTP/HTTPS access to my XAMPP's Apache Web Server on Windows 7. However, when I go to Control Panel -> Windows Firewall, the four entries in bold font as shown in the image below cannot be clicked (these entries will not even change color when hovered with the mouse).

enter image description here

  1. Why can't I click these entries? Was it McAfee that was somehow responsible for disabling these? How can I change the settings back so that these links are enabled?

  2. So, perhaps there is some other way of accomplishing what I'm trying to do. When I click on Advanced Settings (which on this screen appears as Impostazioni Avanzate), I get the following window, but I'm not sure which entry corresponds to allowing TCP/UDP connections on ports 80 and 443 (HTTP and HTTPS). Anyone know which entry I should select in the second screen below and how to proceed?

enter image description here

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Anyways, I've tried adding a rule for entering connections and specifying pors 80 and 443 within such rule, but after adding the rule I still couldn't connect via HTTP/HTTPS to my local website from the computer in the other room. I've even tried the somewhat extreme step of disabling the firewall in public profile under Actions -> Properties, but that still didn't work. What have I done wrong?

Update: I can connect to my Windows 7 PC website from my mobile phone via Wi-Fi using the private IP address space by entering http://192.168.1.68/ into the browser's address bar (I got this IP address from the ipconfig command). I can also connect to the router via Wi-Fi by entering the router's private IP into the browser's address bar using the URL http://192.168.1.254/. Once connected I was able to configure the router so that incoming HTTP, HTTPS, and SSH connections are redirected to my computer when connecting to the router via the external address http://2.234.x.x which I was able to find out from the router's web interface (such router's external address could not be obtained from the PC using ipconfig, and a command such as C:\Windows\System32\tracert www.google.com is also useless for this task because it displays the IP addresses on the wrong side, so that the inner IP address of the router is reported and not its outer IP address).

So now, connecting to the PC running XAMPP using its external IP address (which works both using Wi-Fi as well as coming from the Internet and mobile phone operator networks connected to the Internet), I get the following error message from XAMPP:

enter image description here

Any help with resolving this issue will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Solution

  • I've solved the problem:

    I am running XAMPP 1.8.3. I've opened C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-xampp.conf and at the bottom of the file commented out the following lines:

    #
# New XAMPP security concept
#
<LocationMatch "^/(?i:(?:xampp|security|licenses|phpmyadmin|webalizer|server-status|server-info))">
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from ::1 127.0.0.0/8 \
        fc00::/7 10.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16 \
        fe80::/10 169.254.0.0/16

    ErrorDocument 403 /error/XAMPP_FORBIDDEN.html.var
</LocationMatch>

    like so:

    #
# New XAMPP security concept
#
#<LocationMatch "^/(?i:(?:xampp|security|licenses|phpmyadmin|webalizer|server-status|server-info))">
#   Order deny,allow
#   Deny from all
#   Allow from ::1 127.0.0.0/8 \
#       fc00::/7 10.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16 \
#       fe80::/10 169.254.0.0/16
#
#   ErrorDocument 403 /error/XAMPP_FORBIDDEN.html.var
#</LocationMatch>

    I then restarted Apache in the XAMPP Control Panel for the changes to take effect.

    Regards!