Dos commands

How do you look at your ports from the command prompt and open and close ports. Should all my ports be closed that are not in use. I installed the latest version of zone alarm for my pc(it is a home pc) and, as far as I know, zone alarm continues to meet my needs which are simple-nothing in or out without permission.
even if I am advised against messing with my ports i still would like to know how it is done because, I gotta know!!!
I am taking the dog out and will check back later so for those who offer help and advice I pre-thank you!!!! :cool:

you can use netstat -a to view which ports are currently open. as far as opening and closing ports.. you can't do that the command prompt. you'd need to kill the program/service running the open port.

That is what I needed to know-Thanks!!
So if a program is not running the port is not opened?

Correct. All ports are closed by default, it requires a program or service to open a port to listen on.

I'll attempt to explain this but I'm sure the most experienced people on the board will come along and explain it better...

Applications/services require access to the internet so they chose a path (port) out of your computer.. of which they have roughly 65k to choose from. Most applications/services have default port... which people are familiar with.
SMTP - 25
Telnet - 23
FTP - 21
HTTP - 80
and so on... so when someone enters a website in their browser it knows by default to connect to the address of the site entered on port 80.. although other ports can be specified. For a port to be open on your computer you have to have some sort of software running on the port so the user can actually connect to it... in the case of HTTP some of the more common examples would be apache on *nix and IIS on win... since you're working with Win will stick with that... on Windows (excluding 9x) services are started and run (you can control these threw administrative tools --> services (found on your start menu and/or your control panel)
These services can include FTPd, HTTPd and SMTP if you have IIS isntalled and running. disabling these will close those ports. There is also the Windows Terminal Service and others.
Your other option is the task manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc).. as a side note you will notice 1 or more copies of SVCHost running... this is what runs most of the services you saw in the Service Manager. Other programs which require open ports will be seen in the Task Manager. for example. I don't use IIS on my win system. I use Apache and GuildFTPd.. so when I open the task manager i see apache.exe and guildftpd.exe.. those are both opening ports. Some ports are opened on start-up if the program runs on start... otherwise they will be opened when you run the program.. If you are suspicious of something you see running, try Spybots Search and Destroy it has a great utility for identifying start up programs and what they do.... I hope this helps you out a bit, sorry for the clutter.

Hey jxrry,

I understand that you're intrested in learning about ports and seeing them on your computer... When I was interested in that, one of my friends directed me to a neat program called "Antiyports". This program enables you to view all active ports, you can also use the kill process to deactivate open ones.

Here's the link... its the one at the top (antiyports.exe)

http://www.cyf-kr.edu.pl/ftp/winnt/access.html

Have fun with it, the best way I learn is just by tinkering around with programs. Hope this helps.

--Peace :cool:

thanks I will get it after this

Another cool port tool you might want to consider is Active Ports.

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Active Ports - easy to use tool that enables you to monitor all open TCP/IP and UDP ports on the local computer. Active Ports maps ports to the owning application so you can watch which process has opened which port. It also displays a local and remote IP address for each connection and allows you to close any port. Active Ports can help you to detect trojans and other malicious programs.

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