Allow other machine to connect to WCF Service hosted on localhost, Win7/IIS7

Written by stevey on November 10th, 2011

Moving along with my WCF project; today I needed to connect to the WCF services developed and published to my development machine (localhost, let’s mask its name as “dev1″) from another machine, named “user1″,  in the same network domain, and got the “Operation timed out” error 118. My localhost machine is a Windows 7 Enterprise and the WCF services are hosted on IIS7. Obviously, this was a security setting on the firewall on local machine that had blocked remote access.  Below are the steps I went through to get the problem resolved:

  1. First, I checked if I had access to default port, 80 at dev1 from user1 before I did anything; I browsed to http://dev1/Defaultsite/Default.aspx, and fair enough, not a chance – page was not rendering.
  2. On localhost (dev1), I went to Control Panel -> System and Security -> Windows Firewall -> Allowed Programs; highlighted “World Wide Web Services (HTTP) and changed settings -> checked “Domain” and “Home/Work (private)” checkboxes.
  3. Now browsed to http://dev1/Defaultsite/Default.aspx again and it worked!
  4. But when I browsed to a different port at dev1, http://dev1:8088/WcfHost/Service1.svc, I got denied again, error 118, “The operation timed out”, scary..I thought that I might need to turn on Windows Communication Foundation allowed programs inside Windows Firewall; so I did that but then it sill not worked.
  5. Is this WCF issue or port opening issue? To test that, I created a plain website, TestWeb, and hosted at http://dev1:8088/Testweb, and it still cannot be accessed from “user1″ machine. So this must be that port 8088 is not accessible from another machine.
  6. Back to Windows firewall config tool and went to Advanced Security Settings and created a new inbound connection rule, “RemoteAccessToPort8088″ to allow remote connection to port 8088 and 444.
  7. And this did it! Now I was able to access both http://dev1:8088/WcfHost/Service1.svc and https://dev1:444/WcfHost/Service1.svc from “user1″ machine.
 

6 Comments so far ↓

  1. Sergio Gonzalez says:

    Exelent!!!!

    THANK YOU

  2. Sagar Shitole says:

    Help a Lot !!!!!!!!!

    Thank You :)

  3. Tadit says:

    Great…
    It helped me a lot.

    Thanks.

  4. Rahul says:

    Thanks It Worked like charm

  5. Saved as a favourite, great site!

Reply to Sergio Gonzalez