How to see which ports Windows is listening on

Posted January 2nd, 2012 in Windows

In my last post I looked at how to create an SSH tunnel using PuTTY on Windows, which I used to create a tunnel through to a Microsoft SQL Server. I had some issues and needed to work out if the tunnel was actually open, so this post shows how to see which ports Windows is listening on.

netstat -a -n

Open up a command prompt and use the following command

netstat -a -n

and you'll get output similar to that shown in the screenshot below.

In my case, I'd created 2 tunnels on ports 1433 and 1434. These are shown in the above screenshot surrounded by the red box. Looking at the resulting output we can indeed see these ports are open and listening on the localhost (127.0.0.1).