Windows 7, McAfee Firewall and SmartPhone-Sync - an Adventure. After I installed Windows7 successfully on my Samsung NC10 ("Nessie"), as described in another post in this blog, I wanted to sync my phone with it. I knew how it worked with XP. And I knew this would not help me a bit with Windows 7.
All I had, was the description how to get McAfee and ActiveSync up an running, which worked fine with Windows XP. But with Windows 7, ActiveSync is no longer required, nor is it possible to install it. Windows 7 comes with the Windows Mobile Device Center. What you probably need is the 6.1-update of the WMDC, but that's it.
At the time I was looking for information what I would need to get the SmartPhone-sync working without having to turn off the firewall completely everytime, I found nothing, no matter what keywords I fed into google. So I opened up the old description-page about McAfee and ActiveSync, and added the port that was stated there to the list of system-services:
- Service-name : SmartPhone Sync - TCP In/out : 26695 - Open to a computer or network that is: Standard (including Trusted)
Then I looked for Apps on my computer that sounded like they might do what the ActiveSync-Apps did. I found a single 100%-match:
ceappmgr.exe,
in the directory
C:\Windows\WindowMobile .
I added it with Full Access to McAfee's Program-list. Next, I looked at the other executables in that directory. I added
- wmdcBase.exe
- WmdHost.exe
And tried again. It did not work. I looked through several more directories, added and removed several applications that looked promising to solve the problem, but nothing helped. Then I looked at the log-file generated by the McAfee-firewall, and noticed, that the IP 169.254.2.1 tried to access my computer through ICMP ping (which the firewall blocks), and tcp-port 990, commonly used by FTP for the control-channel when using TLS/SSL. I remembered both the IP and the port from my experiments with syncing the SmartPhone with linux, and decided to add this IP as "trusted" (which is possible directly from the log-entry).
I tried syncing again - and this time it worked.
