SMS_HEIRARCHY_MANAGER_ERROR 3353

I recently found an unusual way that this error can manifest itself in a site. I was deploying sites successfully except one of them cropped up with the SMS_HEIRARCHY_MANAGER_ERROR 3353. If you look at the error message below it makes the issue out to be a SQL communication issue with through a firewall.

What made the situation unique was that the secondary site experiencing issues had the Windows firewall service disabled. Once we turned on the Windows firewall and disabled all profiles (to match the other servers in this environment) the status messages went away. To be clear we didn't need to add the firewall exceptions we just needed to disable the firewall but leave the service running. I assume this error is being triggered because CM can't properly determine the firewall state when the service is disabled.