Choosing ports to include in a portset

Comodo Internet Security - CIS Firewall Help - CIS
#1

I am trying to organize sharing files and printer-sharing in a home network using Windows7. Microsoft instructions list a number of ports to open, e.g.:

"To find other PCs running earlier Windows operating systems, and to use file and printer sharing on any Windows operating system, open these ports:

UDP 137
UDP 138
TCP 139
TCP 445
UDP 5355"

In order to specify to Comodo Firewall what ports I want open, I should (I believe) create a “portset” and then specify that these ports should be open.

When I open the list of ports in Comodo, before I begin to include specific ports in the new “portset”. The list that Comodo presents to me doesn’t specify whether a port number is UDP or TCP. Does this mean that I should include the ports in the portset simply by number and disregard UDP and TCP as trivial for my purposes here. I have seen a table where certain port numbers are in the same row with both UDP and TCP designations. Does this mean the port is governed by two protocols (and so for my purposes I should only pay attention to the number) or that there are different ports, with the same number, which fall under either one protocol or the other, for example: UDP 5355 would be a different port from TCP 5355.

I think that this must be obvious to most of you, but not to me so far. Thanks for whatever clarification you can offer.

BetaFinbar

#2

Port Sets like Network Zones are useless until combined in an actually rule. Their purpose is to provide a logical grouping & sorting of networks and protocols and provide a way to quickly reuse them in the rule creation process since many programs communicate using similar protocols i.e HTTP or HTTPS.

Take a DNS query for example. The DNS protocol uses UDP port 53. Web browsers make DNS queries all the time to look up and convert a web addresses to it IP eqvilant.

You would want to make a Port set called DNS and enter a single port of 53. Then you would want to recreate an application rule, or a more generic ‘Ruleset’ for a group of applications that communicate in a similar way.

An example would be having IE, chrome, and Firefox all installed and setting them to use the ‘Web Brower’ ruleset.

Returning to our Browser’s DNS query example, your application rule would be like:

Action: Allow
Protocol: UDP
Direction: OUT
Source Address: ANY
Destination Address: ANY
Source Port: ANY
Destination: From the drop down menu select ‘A set of Ports’, then for ‘Ports’ select your new Port Set ‘DNS’.