Which firewall ports required to be open for 2008 R2 Transactional Replication?

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Which firewall ports required to be open for 2008 R2 Transactional Replication?

kyle.hanson

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Points: 464
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January 6, 2014 at 11:37 am

#302404

Hi,
I have three servers where I intend to use transactional replication:
- publisher
- distributor
- subscriber
Which firewall ports need to be open between these servers for when it is copying the snapshot files, performing the replication updates, etc? We use port 1433 for SQL Engine so that is already open.
Thanks,
Kyle

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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Perry Whittle SSC Guru Points: 233858 More actions · Answer 1

Firstly, a couple of questions,

Are the servers all firewalled from each other?

Are the instances all default instances?

The snapshot files are delivered via means of an NTFS share. Accessing a Windows share through a firewall requires the following

TCP port 139 is required for NetBIOS session services
UDP port 138 is required for browing datagram responses of NetBIOS
UDP port 137 is required for NetBIOS datagram services

If you want to be able to share folders between your servers and refer to the servers via NetBIOS names (instead of DNS names such as serverB.domain.com) then you will require firewall exceptions for

UDP port 137
UDP port 138
TCP port 139

to be configured between all your servers.

Enabling TCP port 139 only will allow folder sharing using either \\<ip-address>\share or \\<FQDN>\share but not \\<NetBIOS-name>\share

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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

kyle.hanson SSC-Addicted Points: 464 More actions · Answer 2

The publisher and the distributor are not firewalled between each other and are currently working together when it comes to replication.

We are now wanting to add a subscriber using transactional replication which has a firewall between it and the other two servers(pub and dist).

I believe they are all the default instance. They should all be port 1433 if that is why you ask.

Perry Whittle SSC Guru Points: 233858 More actions · Answer 3

kyle.hanson (1/7/2014)
The publisher and the distributor are not firewalled between each other and are currently working together when it comes to replication.

Ok but different instances on different servers?

Where are snapshots stored?

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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

kyle.hanson SSC-Addicted Points: 464 More actions · Answer 4

one instance per server, so yes default instance on each.

snapshot files will be in a folder on the distributor.

kyle.hanson SSC-Addicted Points: 464 More actions · Answer 5

a specific question I have is how does the snapshot/distribution agent apply snapshot to the subscribers? As in, does it copy files, thus needing file sharing ports open, or does it do it entirely through 1433 with bcp?