Net-NewFirewallFule from NetSecurity module fails to add rule to Local GPO store policy

Question

By default, Windows has at least 2 Firewall rules sources: weird local and local group policy. In netsh you can easily switch between them:

netsh advfirewall set store gpo=COMUTERNAME
netsh advfirewall set store local

Any requests to commands *-NewFirewallFule will operate on Local source. I found information that in order to add to Local Group Policy Source you need to specify localhost as a store:

New-NetFirewallRule -Name Blah -PolicyStore localhost

The issue is that while I can easily add any rule via netsh to Local GPO (or do it via MMC's module Local Security Settings), an attempt to use -PolicyStore localhost results in:

Get-NetFirewallRule: The network path was not found.

What could be the issue? This is purely home user client machine, no AD used.

Answer 1

Hi,

According to the help file of the Get-NetFirewallRule, the local GPOs can be specified with the hostname. Please see if the command works with the hostname.

Get-NetFirewallRule -PolicyStore $hostname -Name $name

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/netsecurity/get-netfirewallrule

Best Regards,
Ian Xue

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