It is often useful to know what connections are being made on your local machine. The netstat
command can help with that. Netstat is available on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Each version differs a little in the command-line options and output, but the general usage principles are the same.
I recommend running netstat
with the -n
flag. This flag prevents netstat
from doing reverse-DNS lookups on each address and has the effect of speeding it up significantly.
On Linux, we can use the following command to show open TCP connections:
netstat -nt
The following screenshot shows the result of running this command on Linux:
In the preceding screenshot, you can see that netstat
shows six columns. These columns display the protocol, the sending and receiving queue, the local address, the foreign address, and the connection state. In this example, we see that there are three connections to port 80
. It is likely that this computer is loading up three web pages (as HTTP uses port...