Vista/XP: Allow ICMP Echo Requests (Pings)

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I was sure that we had a thread dedicated to Vista tips and tricks, but for the life of me, I cant find it. Instead, I'll just post this here.

After setting up VMWare, I discovered I was unable to ping my vista host from the guest (nor the XP SP2 guest from the host).

It took a little digging, but I found out that the firewalls on both were disabling ICMP Echo's by default.

On XP, this is relatively easy to enable:

On Vista, its a little more Difficult to do.

I would point out a couple of things with the Vista method here. First - you can create your own rule to do it.

Secondly, the method mentioned isnt completely accurate. On the screenshots, it looks like the rule is called 'Networking - Echo Requests (ICMPv4-In)'. However, on my machine (Vista Ultimate SP1), they are called 'File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request - ICMPv*-In)' - replace the * with whatever version it is.