Linked deployment shares are a feature introduced in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 that let you replicate portions of one deployment share to another deployment share. Before implementing linked deployment shares in a distributed network environment, you may need to know the ports used by MDT for replicating content between linked shares so that an intervening firewall can be configured appropriately to allow replication to occur. However, you cannot find this information in the MDT 2010 documentation or help file.
The port requirements for linked deployment shares are simply those of Server Message Block (SMB), the Windows file sharing protocol. This is because MDT uses SMB when it replicates content between linked deployment shares. SMB uses TCP port 445 as indicated by this KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832017
Mitch Tulloch is a seven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and widely recognized expert on Windows administration, deployment and virtualization. For more tips by Mitch you can follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook.
