I’ve been hoping for a while now that we’d start seeing a few more network tools apps for the iPhone, for all the techies and network engineers out there. This weekend a couple of apps in this area caught my eye, and I’ve been testing them both out a little.
The first of these is IP Port List – which lets you search for and view some information on all well-known (0-1023) and IANA registered ports (1024-49151). It doesn’t offer to do anything else apart from act as a ports reference – but that’s fine by me and potentially very useful for anyone who needs to deal with managing and / or monitoring networks, traffic, firewalls, and network security.
For a good introduction to TCP / UDP ports, and ports in general, you might want to check this Wikipedia page. When you’re looking after a network, knowing your common ports that are in use by your own servers / routers / approved network services is essential – as it makes it much easier to identify traffic that represents a threat to your network and / or is already slowing down your network. When you are monitoring traffic, it’s important to be able to identify the causes of spikes or anomalies.
And for most of us it’s pretty hard to memorize any great percentage of the thousands of registered ports tracked by IANA. Generally, if you’re in the sort of role that involves traffic monitoring / analysis, you should probably know the commonly used service ports (FTP, SSH, POP3, SMTP, DNS etc.) and those associated with well-known services on your network (e.g 3389 for Windows Terminal Services). Beyond that though, it’s a great help to have a good ports reference around when you’re checking on traffic. I used to have a couple favorite web sites for this, but having all the info available on the iPhone is a big winner.
IP Port List is quite basic, but also simple to use and effective at its purpose. You can update the ports listing (straight from IANA) at any time with a single tap of the update button. Naturally, this is best done when you have a WiFi or 3G connection.
All of the ports information is held locally on the iPhone – so you can always access it, even if you have no network connection available to you.
For each port, the app will show you the port number, the service commonly associated with it, and the protocols it uses …
In addition to information on valid, standard service ports, the app will also help to recognize some bandwidth-hogging applications that you don’t want to see on a network, like many P2P sharing apps …
The ports list is full-text searchable – so you can search by port number or by the name of a service or application you’re trying to track down.
This is a great little reference app, and a handy tool if you work with firewalls, routers, networks and such, for sure.
IP Port List is in the App Store (iTunes link) now, and costs $0.99.
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