Connections blocked on 'Home/Office'

I have just installed Bitdefender 2017 having been using 2015 before that. I now find that computers on my network can't see each other and can't always ping each other. It seems to be inconsistent, so computer A can ping computer B, but B can't ping A, even though they appear to have the same settings in BD firewall. If I turn the firewall off, everything works, so it is clearly the Bitdefender firewall that is blocking.

All my adapters are set to the default - Home/Office - Off - Off. If I change to Trusted, then I can start to see other computers and everything works as expected.

So what is the difference between Home/Office and Trusted? The user guide is pretty useless on this, it just says

"Network Type - the type of network your computer is connected to."

Well that's helpful isn't it?

I don't remember having this issue with earlier BD version and I have been using it for years.

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Ian_C

Well I have partly answered my own question by doing some testing. When the adapter is set to Trusted, the firewall does nothing. Any application can get through to the internet. That is a very bad idea, so I have switched back to Home/Office.

So can anybody explain what is happening here? Home/Office is blocking traffic between computers on the same network and preventing file sharing. I have tried setting a Network Exception to allow the specific IP address of the blocked computer, but it makes no difference.

If I can't fix this I am just going to have to reinstall BD 2015.

Sorin G.

Hello,

Please ensure that you set all the machines on the network with Home/Office - OFF - ON.

The Generic setting allows the product to remember the setting after a reboot, most likely the Adapter is set to Public under Windows and the product will reset to that setting after a machine reboot.

Should the issue persist after following the above steps please contact our support team via bitsy@bitdefender.com with the logs from the Bitdefender Support Tool attached.

https://www.bitdefender.com/support/How-to-generate-a-support-log--1168.html

Ian_C

Thank you for replying. Actually, the problem went away by itself, I have no idea why. The next day, everything worked fine, I had changed nothing. As stated in the original post, the firewall was definitely causing the problem because disabling it meant I could share files, re-enabling it immediately blocked them again.

The adapter is set to Home under Windows, not Public, and always has been.

On a slightly related topic, when I had the problem I was looking in the event log to see whether requests from other computers on the network were being blocked. There was nothing there. I am sure that in older BD versions there was a lot more information being logged. Have the logs been simplified, and if so, is there a way to get back the detail that used to be there? When a problem arises it is useful to be able to see that information.