Sorry for my ignorrance...

hello everyone i hope some one has the patientce to help me. I am new to all the port forwarding and port opening and port what ever. i was wondering if some one would explain to how to open and close ports, or how to direct certain programs to certain ports. i do not have a router (should i get one?), but my cable modem is a surf board SB3100. I have win xp, sp 2, my firewall is the free zone alarm version. also, are certain ports better for certain things?

 

There is No Good or Bad Ports. Each application needs specific ports.

May be this can Help: http://www.ezlan.net/faq#ports

 

A curious link :

I would argue that technically this is wrong. The ports that this is referring to are not hardware based. They are virtual in the sense that they have no physical hardware representation.
There are something in the order of 32,000 ports available (I'm guessing this is tied to IP v4 and/or IP v6 - but am not sure and would need to check) and the first 1024 or so are tied by convention to specific protocols. The remaining ports are available for applications to use.

Would it be possible to redirect the traffic from one port to another using a small app???

 

Hmmm.. There are like more than 64000. They do start with Hardware, and it is nothing to do with IP.

Your Keyboard, Printer, Drives, Audio, CD-ROM, etc. All are using ports in order to interact with the main processing unit.

 

Actually, they use Buses, not ports.

The ports referred to in networking and in this thread are virtual. They are software based, not hardware based, and yes, there are over 64k. I could look up the exact number, but I am lazy.

 

There are 65536 ports, numbered 0 to 65535.

IANA - TCP/IP Port Assignments

 

You are much more motivated than I am

 

Do you have a link explaining that?

I'd like to hear more about it.

 

Last I looked hardware used Interrupt Request Lines or better known as IRQ's and there are 16 IRQ's available to hardware, numbered 0 to 15.

 

Now I'm well and truly confused...

And since you guys have now made me dig out my TCP/IP book you're all in for it

I think the topic of conversation has wondered off from the 'network ports' (these ARE virtual) to 'hardware ports'...

The following is summed up from what I've read...
Regarding hardware ports:
This is an interface that connects a hardware device to a computer. Internal ports connect devices like hard disks, monitors... external ports connect devices like modems, printers etc...

This is NOT the same as a Network Port:
During network communication not only does the machine have to be specified (by its IP) but also that a specific process operating on the machine receives the traffic. This is implemented with ports and sockets. The book goes on to describe an analogy of a computers 'telephone number' being the IP address, and the specific 'extension number for what you want' being the port.

A port number is 16 bit (I can only humbly apologise for saying aprox 32000 before - I knew it was 2 to the power of something, and 2 to the power of 15 just doesn't make sense...2 to the power of 16 is 65536) - but I was correct regarding that port numbers below 1024 are reserved for popular comms services (SSH, FTP, TCP/IP, SMTP etc etc) - this apparently comes from old UNIX days...

Does this clarify any, or add more confusion?

 

Your right on target