Best Practices

• Spend some time with the scenarios in this book and others that you can think of and go through how to implement them in the Windows Firewall.

• Build separate GPOs for Windows Vista and Windows XP firewall configuration and use WMI to filter them.

• Use outbound blocking sparingly. The most valuable filters are on by default already and most things you do beyond that do little for security and much to annoy your users.

• Exempt your management traffic over VPN connections, as appropriate.

• Turn immediately to Chapter 12 and learn how to use server and domain isolation to protect your Windows network.