How can I open/close ports on my PC

[Wikkedness]

Happy Holidays everyone,

I'm trying to find out if it's possible to open or close ports on my PC. For example: 23 for telnet or 25 for FTP. Does anybody know how to do this? I know these ports currently aren't open because I'm using Vision to port scan my PC.

Any help for opening ports on a Win XP pro or Linux box would be much appreciated

Thank You -James

 

[JackMDS]

PC does Not have Closed Ports.

The port on the PC are always Open otherwise there is No PC.

For security purposes we have Applications (like Firewalls) and Appliances (Like Cable/DSL Routers) that block unwanted traffic to the Ports.

I do not know what keeps your Ports "Closed" so you have to read the manual of What ever is keeping your ports "Closed", it will tell you how to "Open it".

:sun:

 

[Nothinman]

The port on the PC are always Open otherwise there is No PC.

Not true, firewalls can block ports even if something is listening on them.

Any help for opening ports on a Win XP pro or Linux box would be much appreciated

Start something that listens on the port, that will open it. If you have a firewall you'll probably have to tell it to allow incoming connections on those ports as well. If you have a hardware router/firewall you'll also probably need to forward those ports to your machine if you want them available on the Internet.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

The port on the PC are always Open otherwise there is No PC.

Not true, firewalls can block ports,[ even if something is listening on them.

It is a verbal conceptual issue, if a Port can be closed on the PC why do we need Firewall?

Well because even stating (like I did) that Ports on the PC are always "Open" is actually not precise either. Ports are just there like the CPU and every thing else.

A programmer uses commands in a Program in order to Use a specific Port.

A special application like Firewalls can block the command from been executed on the Port, so we call it ?Closing the Port? (or may be more precise would be Closing the Access to the Port), but the Ports themselves as a Hardware Entity are always available.

The point is that since when a users do not tell us what Application is Closing the Ports we can not tell them how to Open a Port, since it not a general Computer Hardware thing.

:sun:

 

[Nothinman]

It is a verbal conceptual issue, if a Port can be closed on the PC why do we need Firewall?

Because it's not always possible to close ports, for instance you can't enable SMB filesharing over TCP/IP on just one interface. It's either open to the world or closed, so you could enable it and use a firewall to filter where incoming connections are allowed from.

And it's possible that there could be bugs in the TCP/IP stack, using a firewall to filter packets before they hit the local stack can help prevent issues like DoS attacks and OS fingerprinting.

 

[Jolt2]

Try this site for info. You do not state what make or model router you have or if you have a software firewall running. Is Windows firewall turned on?

http://www.portforward.com/default.htm

If it is WindowsXP firewall try this site.

http://www.microsoft.com/athom...ity/protect/ports.mspx