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I ran the following command to see what ports are opened on my machine i.e Ubuntu 21.10 x86_64

nmap localhost

and got the following result

Starting Nmap 7.80 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-01-15 16:25 IST
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.00020s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
5054/tcp open  rlm-admin
9050/tcp open  tor-socks

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.09 seconds

It also had a service IPP open, with a tcp port open I googled it and found that it's related to connecting to printers or something similar. I don't use printer with my machine so I stopped that service using systemctl and also disabled it to run on startup.

I followed the answers on this question in case someone is curious.

So my question is that what these services(rlm-admin and tor-socks) are doing and should I stop them as well or not and how to?

And I have Tor-Browser installed which uses a tor-server I guess.

Khushal
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1 Answers1

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When there is a port open, some program is running to open the port. If it is a well known service on the port (like CUPS), you can guess what has it open.

To determine what is using less well known ports and ports that could be used by multiple services, the command sudo ss -ltp should list all your open TCP ports and (if run as root with sudo) list the program that has each port open. (Older systems and non-linux systems can use the near equivalent netstat -nlp)

Once you know what is listening on the port, you can decide if this is a service you don't need (and then disable it or uninstall it), or you can firewall it so that it can only be used locally, or you can leave it open.

user10489
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