[sethwb]

Hello friends,

I'm just doing some research, well, actually that's not correct. I'm trying to do research on the way that ports are controlled in windows XP. Here are my questions:

1. Is the firewall the only part of the operating system that controls ports?
2. How many ports are available for use on an XP system?
3. I was told somewhere that there are 65,000+ ports on any given XP machine, does this include printer/udp/tcp/software ports?
4. What different kind of ports are there in windows?


That's all for now I think!

Thanks,
Seth

[Elvandil]

The firewall doesn't control ports at all. It only allows or disallows access to them.

There are 65536 TCP ports that have nothing to do with serial or parallel ports for other devices.

What kinds of "ports" are you supposed to be working on? The total of all kinds depends on the machine and not the OS.

[sethwb]

Thank you Elvandil!!

To answer your question I will just tell you how the idea for this research topic came about:

I found out about the netstat command from a network administrator at my school. He said there is a way to cross reference the open ports found in the netstat -a/-b list with processes running on my computer in case I ever want to kill a connection, and find out who is connected to my pc.

Does this answer your question?

[Jason08]

There are also the ICMP ports as well.

[sethwb]

Is the ICMP counted in the 65536?

[Jason08]

Yes.

[sethwb]

Thanks for the information guys. I'm still reading about TCP ports and the netstat command, but I'm a little lost:

If the firewall doesn't control TCP ports, what part of the windows xp operating system does?