Firewall Breaks Internet Access

Hello,

recently GW started acting strange. When using Ask To Connect, many programs like Firefox, Opera, Dropbox etc. will be completely cut off from internet access, while Ping and nslookup still work. Most software doesn’t, however. This is independent of any Flames being red or grey, as soon as the FW is turned on, internet is just dead.

What’s weirder is that when I create a new firewall profile and choose to restore defaults, this will not help. All blocked software is now unblocked, but neither restarts of GW, the GW service, or the software that’s being blocked changes this. Disabling the GW service restores access.

I have reinstalled GW a couple times, checking restore win firewall settings doesn’t help. Clean install however does help, BUT this removes all of my usage history. I would be fine with redoing my firewall settings but I am not fine with losing my usage history. I am on GW Elite so there’s a fair bit of logs. How do I proceed?

@silunare

This may be a bug left over from one of our first 2.0 versions of GlassWire, sorry about that. To solve the problem:

  • Go to add/remove programs and uninstall GlassWire.

  • Go to the Windows Firewall control panel and choose “restore defaults”.

  • Reboot

  • Now reinstall GlassWire using its “clean” install option along with its “reset firewall” option.

If you need to keep your GlassWire history backup instructions are here: https://www.glasswire.com/userguide/#Backup_Settings

Hello, thanks for being here on a sunday!

I followed your instructions as well as those linked to the T, including the reboots and multiples of installing/uninstalling. I did:

  1. Uninstall GW
  2. Restore Windows fw defaults
  3. Reboot
  4. Rename Folders
  5. Install GW clean w/ fw reset
  6. Check if it works - yes, it does
  7. Uninstall GW
  8. Remove folders and rename backup folders to restore
  9. Install GW w/o clean options
  10. Check if it works - no it doesn’t, back to where I started

To be clear, after 10. I started Firefox, it didn’t work. Closed FF again, went into GW FW tab (it’s set to Ask to Connect, FW ON), deleted Firefox from there. Open Firefox again. It works for a brief second, loads some pages (might have been cache, not 100% sure). Couple seconds later GW finally asks about Firefox (took pretty long honestly), I say yes, and from that point onwards Firefox is blocked again, even though I just permitted it. Restarting the PC or Firefox doesn’t solve the issue.

Edit: Win10 x64, GW v2.0.112 but was the same on v105.

@silunare

If you only restore the GlassWire database, and not its settings does it solve the problem? Then you’d need to start with fresh settings but at least you’ll still have your history.

And how exactly do I do this? I have tried replacing only the stats folder in ProgramData/Glasswire/service, and that keeps part of the history, but everything has names like 105, 201, 215, instead of actual names.

@silunare

I discussed this problem with our team and found my recommendation of restoring only the database was not possible, sorry. We’re discussing and we hope to add this option in the future.

Unfortunately the only solution here is to lose your history until this change is implemented sometime in the future. Somehow your firewall rules are corrupted and they are causing this problem.