RE: Some 'new guy' questions

[Meidinger Chris <chris.meidinger () badenit de>]

Hi Sayo,

if people flame you for asking newbie questions, it's usually because they
have no idea themselves what they are talking about, just ignore them.

Anyway, you can use fport from foundstone.com to see which application is
bound to which port. Then you just use google to research the applications
and find out what they are. To close them open Task Manager and end the
appropriate process.

As to your second question, you actually have a lot of functionality in the
windows XP command prompt. It's still nothing against Linux, but it's MUCH
better than Windows 9x. (Windows NT always had a much better command line
than 9x.) You can get cygwin from cygwin.com (or is it .org?) which is a
linux command line (and much more) for windows. Or you can use google to
find a different windows shell.

To compile programs from source you need what is called a compiler. This is
almost never necessary on windows, and constantly necessary on linux.
Essentially all distributions of Linux come packed with multiple compilers,
you will learn how to use them by reading howto pages and man pages and
such.

As to what that other guy said about switching to linux, that is the single
best thing you can do for your computer knowledge. Just do it. I recommend
Gentoo from gentoo.org but everyone has their favorite. 

Any other questions feel free to mail.

badenIT GmbH
System Support
 
Chris Meidinger
Tullastrasse 70
79108 Freiburg


-----Original Message-----
From: Sayo Venchetti [mailto:november_echone () yahoo com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 1:23 AM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Some 'new guy' questions




Hey, kind of a new guy to the security field...I only have basic and 
intermediate knowledge of the subject, but I ran a netstat -ano on my 
computer the other day and noticed I have a bunch of connections to my 
computer set on Listening status, that I have not activated myself, and 
appear to be hackers(?). I was wondering if there's a command to manually 
close those connections? BTW, I'm running Windows XP if it means 
anything :P

Also, I was wondering, as I'm getting more and more into security and 
such, I'm trying to learn as much as I can soon, so to start off, I have 
a simple question. Windows, any build after 95, scrapped the DOS system 
and replaced it with a watered down crappier version called Command 
Prompt :P. When I'm running batch programs, and commands for nbtstat and 
netstat and such, is there anything better than command prompt, like, can 
I download DOS somewhere? Also, how exactly do I compile programs from 
source documents? Thanks much,

Sayo

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