Any way to stop awesome miner from creating firewall rules for every mining software?
I don't want everyone on my LAN to have access to the mining software on my miners.
Local connections usually work even if you don't allow the program, is there any particular reason for awesome miner to create firewall rules?
There are currently no setting to prevent this behavior in Awesome Miner.
Awesome Miner is registering the mining software as an allowed application. Mining software must be able to make outgoing pool connections and also open an API port where Awesome Miner connects for monitoring information. If an application isn't registered to the Windows firewall it may be blocked and Windows almost always shows a dialog where the user must accept the application.
If you try to start almost any mining software outside of Awesome Miner (a software that Awesome Miner didn't register already) you will see that Windows Defender Firewall will show a warning dialog - unless Defender is completely disabled.
In Windows Defender Firewall you also have a setting called "Block all incoming connections, including those in the list of allowed apps". That might be the one you are looking for in your specific scenario.
As for the inbound rules, I understand is good to have them to prevent the popups but there is no need to have them as "allow the connection" rules, because the monitoring connections are local we could have them as "block the connection" rules and the monitoring would still work correctly(as far as I have tested over the years) without allowing other LAN devices access to the mining software.
The "Block all incoming connections, including those in the list of allowed apps" might seem enough for most use cases but I have mining computers that serve other content so I need access to some of their ports.
Please consider adding an option so we can decide whether to create the rules as allow or block rules, thank you.
Can this be solved by using the setting to block all incoming connections, but then explicitly configure Windows Defender to open up a few ports that you need?
Even if you only monitor mining software locally, Windows will still complain and show the Blocked dialog when you launch the mining software unless it's an allowed application. This is the reason why Awesome Miner adds the mining software as allowed as it's very difficult to run mining operations without it.