The Firewall Is Eleven Hops Away
“Port 445 is blocked somewhere” is not a diagnosis, and it is why firewall tickets bounce between you and your provider for a week. Every router on the path owes you an ICMP Time Exceeded when your hop budget runs out, and that turns a timeout into a distance. I walked the TTL up on my own line and found three faults I did not know I had: an SMB drop eleven hops out, forged SMTP resets one hop away, and an IPv4 rule with no IPv6 twin.