Labview 7 Web services: how to turn off

[GretchenSkellyZimmer]

This summer, we had an outside Cyber Security team come in and perform a security audit on our network.

They found numerous 'open ports' on our Windows hosts, ie the PC was 'listening on port 3085'.

This was flagged as a security vulnerability.

Most of our PC's are still running XP, and many have versions of Labview prior to Labview 8.6.

For those PCs, if, in a browser you bring up http://<yourSystemName>:3580, you get a page that says The service you specified does not exist.

I would like to close this port to reduce our number of flagged security items. We do not publish web pages from these older systems.

I tried turning items off via the Tools options, but to no avail.  How can I turn web services off in older versions of Labview?

Thanks,

G Zimmer

[nathand]

Which port is open?  You mention both port 3580, and 3085.  The former is used by NI; as far as I can tell, the latter is not.  There's a description of many of the ports used by NI software here: http://www.ni.com/white-paper/12402/en.  From that list, for older versions of LabVIEW it appears that the only service likely to be running on port 3580 is the FPGA compile server.  Are you using LabVIEW FPGA?

EDIT: oops, I should have read that table more carefully: it appears that port 3580 is used for FPGA compiles starting with LabVIEW 2010, not older versions.  However, I can't seem to find quickly which port previous versions of LabVIEW FPGA used for the compile server.

EDIT2: Port 3580 is the NI Service Locator, even on older versions of LabVIEW.  Run a search for that on the NI forum.  You probably need it to be running for LabVIEW to function fully.

[GretchenSkellyZimmer]

Edit:  Oops, typo on the port # --- 3580

I have searched the discussion forums for 'port 3580'

Zimmer

[nathand]

Sorry, what I meant was run a search for "NI Service Locator."  A search for that will come up with several mentions of it.  While you can disable it (it runs as a service in Windows), some parts of LabVIEW will not work without it.

[GretchenSkellyZimmer · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the tip!  I did a search on that (NI Service Locator) and yes, it provided some good info & links.

One document states:

As of Labview 2010 NI Service Locator has benn renamed to System Web Server.

That little fact helps alot.  I had been searching on 'Web Server / Services'.

I turned off NI Service Locator by going to Control Panel>>Administrative Tools>>NI Service Locator.

Now, when I try http://<yourSystemName>:3580 in a browser, I get Oops!  Chrome could not connect to ....

Security Hole Gone!  Hooray!

Downside:  Labview Example Finder and Labview Help will not have complete functionality.  other programs?  I'll have to find out.

NI does not recommend turning off NI Service Locator, cannot guarantee the functionality of NI Software if you do so.

Just thought I'd include that.

Again, thanks for the tip.  That's what I needed to know.

Gretchen