Configuring SQL Server for external access on Windows 2003

Recently I was trying to expose SQL Server for external access on a Windows 2003 server. I ran into several issues:

• Port 1433 was blocked by the firewall. This serverfault article explains how to detect and correct this


• The TCP/IP filters for inbound access had to be altered. This Microsoft article describes doing this

In retrospect neither of these issues are surprising, but especially the TCP/IP filter issue took me some time to track down, so perhaps this will help someone else.