How do i find what ports are being used.

The only way I know is through Terminal and I don't really feel comfortable explaining it. If you don't mind going this far into your Mac, this site explains commands used to what ports are being used by the server and system. It seems simple enough but look for yourself first. There may be a less invasive procedure. Good luck and wait for more advice.




<http://www.macos-x-server.com/wiki/index.php?title=Network ServicePorts>

I followed that link around and found many Apple downloads to chose from. This site leads to many others that concern the multiple ports in any given network. I think you would find what best suits your needs. Good luck, gotta go.

<http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/networking_security/pathanalyzerpro.html>


Ray

Hi Moderith--

Welcome to the Apple Discussions.

Look in your Utilities folder for the Network Utility program. Open it, and choose "Port Scan" from the row of tabs in its window. If you're not running Network Utility on the problematic G4, use the G4's IP address. But if you're actually on the G4, use "localhost".

Note that if you check the open ports on the G4 from another computer, you won't see as many as if you check it from the G4 itself. That's because some ports are only local. For example, I have enabled the mail server on my Macs, but only to deliver mail, not relay it. So if I do a port scan using "localhost", I see port 25 open, but it's not open from another computer.

charlie

Have you tried using Network Utility, found in /Applications/Utilities? In the Info window you can get the Mac's IP address and then in the Port Scan window you can use that to have the Mac self-scan and obtain a list of all open ports.

If you're comfortable using Unix commands in Terminal, you may want to investigate the netstat command.

Network Utility will tell you what ports are open, but not necessarily which application is using them.

A more precise method is the tool lsofwhich can show you, amongst other things, active network connections, including the application that's using them.

<pre class=command>sudo lsof -i -P</pre>

The -i restricts lsof to show IP connections (as opposed to all the other things it can show). -P turns off port name conversion so that it shows port numbers rather than service names, which is easier when you know the port number you're after.