Before you go down the RPC route / opening up ports you should understand what it means.

When an RPC enabled service starts up it connects to the RPC registration service on the local machine at a well known port. The registration service allocates it a port to listen on. This port number is not necessarily the same one that it used last time. This means that your RPC enabled services change the port that they listen on each time that they run.

When you need to connect to the service from another machine, you first connect to the RPC location service on the well known port, and tell it the name and version of the service you want to talk to. The RPC locator then tells you what port the service is running on.

All this means that you cannot open up the port for an RPC enabled service because it may change every time the service starts.

Some services (such as Exchange) have kludges which allow you to specify the port to bind to, to get around the firewall problem.

Of course if it's not RPC then you won't have the problem.

There are a couple of open port checking solutions about - I wrote a quick'n'dirty external binary called "portchek" a while back (use "search" to locate it), and I think there was a KiXtart add-on DLL which also provided name resolution and pinging - again, search is your friend.

[ 18. November 2002, 10:09: Message edited by: Richard Howarth ]