Enable ICMP Response on W2k8 Firewall

The firewall on Windows Server 2008 is turned on by default and ICMP echoes are disabled. According to Microsoft you should be able to enable it using:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”ICMP Allow incoming V4 echo request” protocol=icmpv4:8,any dir=in action=allow

The result of this is "An invalid value was specified" which makes sense if you look at what netsh should be provided with. Rather than adding this custom rule, I had a look to see if there was a rule already there, but disabled. There is, but it's called "File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request - ICMPv4-In)" for some reason.

So, to enable it use:

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request - ICMPv4-In)" new enable=yes

Happy pinging.