Monday, April 27, 2015

How to determine what TCP/UDP Ports are being used in Windows?

When debugging and troubleshooting Windows applications, one of the common issues that arise is the usage of Network Ports on the machine.

When running multiple applications on a server/computer, you may encounter port conflicts or need to determine if the application is truly listening on a particular port or not.

Fortunately, there are numerous tools to accomplish this:

  1. You can always resort to the command line netstat command (ex: netstat -aon) to determine the processes and their listening pors.
  2. You can use the SysInternals tool TcpView to view the individual names of processes (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb897437.aspx)
  3. You can use the built-in Windows tool ResMon (resmon.exe) and click on the Network tab to view the list of Listening Ports.
  4. You can use a standalone utility such as CurrPorts (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html)

Personally, my favorite amongst all of these methods is by far CurrPorts.  CurrPorts provides an easy way to view Processes and dig into the details of individual processes.  In addition, it offers a filtering capability for processes not offered by any other tool!

Therefore, if you are trying to troubleshoot the network ports your Windows system is operating on, I would highly recommend using CurrPorts!

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