· software-development devops-2

Understanding what lsof socket/port aliases refer to

Earlier in the week we wanted to check which ports were being listened on and by what processes which we can do with the following command on Mac OS X:

$ lsof -ni | grep LISTEN
idea       2398 markhneedham   58u  IPv6 0xac8f13f77b903331      0t0  TCP *:49410 (LISTEN)
idea       2398 markhneedham   65u  IPv6 0xac8f13f7799a4af1      0t0  TCP *:58741 (LISTEN)
idea       2398 markhneedham  122u  IPv6 0xac8f13f7799a4711      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:6942 (LISTEN)
idea       2398 markhneedham  249u  IPv6 0xac8f13f777586711      0t0  TCP *:63342 (LISTEN)
idea       2398 markhneedham  253u  IPv6 0xac8f13f777586331      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:63342 (LISTEN)
java      16973 markhneedham  152u  IPv6 0xac8f13f777586af1      0t0  TCP *:56471 (LISTEN)
java      16973 markhneedham  154u  IPv6 0xac8f13f779e6b711      0t0  TCP *:menandmice-dns (LISTEN)
java      16973 markhneedham  168u  IPv6 0xac8f13f77b902f51      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:7474 (LISTEN)
java      16973 markhneedham  171u  IPv6 0xac8f13f77b013711      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:7473 (LISTEN)

One of the interesting things about this output is that for the most part it shows the port number and which IPs it will accept a connection from but sometimes it uses a socket/port alias.

In this case we can see that the 3rd last line refers to 'menandmice-dns' but others could be 'http-alt' or 'mysql'.

We can find out what port those names refer to by looking in /etc/services:

$ cat /etc/services | grep menandmice-dns
menandmice-dns  1337/udp    # menandmice DNS
menandmice-dns  1337/tcp    # menandmice DNS
$ cat /etc/services | grep http-alt
http-alt	591/udp     # FileMaker, Inc. - HTTP Alternate (see Port 80)
http-alt	591/tcp     # FileMaker, Inc. - HTTP Alternate (see Port 80)
http-alt	8008/udp     # HTTP Alternate
http-alt	8008/tcp     # HTTP Alternate
http-alt	8080/udp     # HTTP Alternate (see port 80)
http-alt	8080/tcp     # HTTP Alternate (see port 80)

There’s a massive XML document on the IANA website with a full list of the port assignments which is presumably where /etc/services is derived from.

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