Established Ports.

[d3ano]

I ran a netstat on one of my PCs at home and it came up with a $hitload of Established Ports. Im not to sure about the port thing and i was wondering if it was a gateway for a hacker.
I am currently running Norton Personal Firewall, but concered if i need all these ports to be established. And if not how do i close them?
I think that all these established ports are slowing my broadband connection down too.

Cheers

D3

[puggit]

They won't be slowing down BB as that all goes through the HTTP, HTTPS and FTP ports (buggered if I can be arsed to remember the numbers but 23 rings a bell...)

Just use the firewall, and ask it to request each time you need to access anything. Then you know they are all closed except for when you choose

[tuffer]

BB does not all go through HTTP etc, it goes through whatever port the service you request is running on (1 - 65535). Can you get a screen capture of the netstat command (use Alt - Print Screen together and paste into word), or edit copy from the cmd prompt and paste it onto here. I will take a look for you, a lot of connections to web pages stay open for a long time after you have visited a page, they will eventually time out.

[Marshy]

Not a problem... there's often a whole bunch of ports you'll see listed as "established". Much of it is Windows talking to itself.

The ones you should be interested in are the ones where the "Foreign Address" is not either "<yourcomputername>" or "localhost".

You'll see stuff for current web connections, any instant messenger apps, any file shares on your local network, etc.

You'll also see things listed as "CLOSE_WAIT" or "TIME_WAIT" which are basically old connections that have closed or are in the process of closing.