Firewall blocking access to TV Guide (2 Viewers)

[Man Pang]

Hello,

I spent a couple of days trying to resolve this issue and cannot figure it out. I have set up MediaPortal Server on an old Windows 7 machine and the Client on a new Windows 11 machine. I can open MediaPortal on the client machine and go into TV section. From TV, I try to access the guide and I it cannot retrieve it from the server and I am asked to specify the IP of the server.

On the server side, TVService.exe is enabled in the firewall. For good measure, ports 31456 and 554 are also enabled. Switching off the firewall at the server side does enable access to the TV Guide on the client. Furthermore, switching on Home or network (private) location settings on the firewall but public network location settings switched off also allows me to access the TV Guide from the client. This is very strange as it appears the TV Guide is trying to establish a connection outside the LAN. What is it trying to connect to?

I confirm that ports 31456 and 554 can be accessed by the client via telnet.

I could install Visual Studio and debug the code but before I do that, can anyone shed any light on why enabling public firewall settings blocks the TV Guide?

Thanks in advance!

 

[CyberSimian]

can anyone shed any light on why enabling public firewall settings blocks the TV Guide?

I find networking to be quite a puzzle.

I have noticed on my own home network that it needs to be defined as a private network, and not a public network. (I am using a mixture of Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines.) Note that defining your home network as private does not stop your system being able to access the internet.

For a public network, Windows imposes much more restrictive access rules to prevent your system being penetrated by malware, and I guess that this prevents full access to TV Server.

Do you need to define your network as public?

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[Man Pang]

Good shout! Working when setting the network to private. Windows 7 firewall certainly doesn't behave like it does in Windows 10/11.

Saved me a lot of time having to debug the code. Thanks for the tip!