Cant uncheck "allow incoming echo requests"

[trojanman]

In xp firewall, I cant uncheck "allow incoming echo requests". Any ideas?

 

[bcastner]

This is "by design" if an exception is made for Printer and File sharing.

Generally speaking, you want to allow ping requests through, at least on your subnet. In any case, if you unchecked it you would be blocking port 445, a necessary port for directly hosted SMB requests. From the Web:

From what I can gather the "Allow incoming echo requests" is grayed out by default. The only way I know of to change that is to disable port 445. Go to the Windows Firewall Exceptions page and select "File and Printer Sharing". Uncheck port 445. Click OK twice. That should block any ping requests. You should still be able to access shared resources from the single IP address through port 139.

Note: When I tested this there was a slight delay between when I disabled port 445 and incoming ping requests were blocked. It wasn't until the second ping attempt that the message "Request timed out" was returned. Further attempts were blocked.

 

[trojanman]

Generally speaking yes but I'll be attending Defcon tomorrow, so Im locking down my doze box as much as possible.