Many TCP/UDP ports open

[Irfan Ahmed_1]

Hi all,

I have two HP-N4000 systems. The no. of ports open in both the systems are different. Both are installed with HP.UX 11.00 OS .

I want to know why there is difference in the no. of ports open?
Also some extra hardware is present in one of the system. Will this have any impact?

xntpd is present on one of the system? What it means?

Waiting for reply
-Irfan

[Peter Heinemann]

- xntpd is the Network Time Protocol daemon which syncronizes your system clock with a network time server (if you want). Looks like it's configured to start on one of your systems; under hp-ux 11.11, the startup is configured in /etc/rc.config.d/netdaemons
More info. is available in man 1(m) xntpd

- ports open will vary between system due based on applications running and configurations. Compare your /etc/services files between the two. Also see if you have the lsof (list open files) utility; you can specifically examine what's using ports via lsof.

[Biswajit Tripathy]

xntpd is the NTP (network time protocol) daemon.
If you are not using NTP, then this should be
disabled. See NTP documentation at:

http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-90774/ch04.html

When you say number of ports open, I'm
assuming that you mean number of ports in listen
state (i.e netstat -a | grep LISTEN). These ports
are the services provided by your system. Note
that /etc/services file does NOT decide which
services are provided by your system. Since both
your machines are 11.00, the /etc/services files in
both machines are likely to be same.

You might want to consider blocking all the ports
that you are not using by IPFilter system firewall.

- Biswajit