port

There are 65,534 Ports in TCP/IP. Some applications run by using a IP address and Port number.

Now if you need additional information, on your computer search for a file called "network" and this has all the ports and services that are assigned to them. All ports under 1024 are reserved for specific services.

Mike

In the TCP/IP world, a "port" is part of the IP address. Under NetWare, it was called a socket.

Basically, the idea is that an IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.1) only locates the host but doesn't locate the services that might be running on that host. So by adding an additional 16-digit counter, you can address a total of 65,535 ports (2 to the 16th) or services. Some of the more common ports are FTP (port 21), HTTP (port 80), DNS (port 53).
So, a full address for a Web server would be 192.168.0.1:80 and the full address for the DNS server on the same box would be 192.168.0.1:53

On the other hand, a COM port is a serial hardware communications port as would be used by a low-speed peripheral device (a mouse, a modem, in the old days, ascanner or printer). The basic PC architecture only supports four COM ports so to go beyond that, you need hardware that does an address translation.

So I guess I would summarize the definitions as: A COM port is a hardware connection point forserial data transfer. A TCP/IP port is actually a software address that particular programs use to route data to and from the service associated with that port.

paul

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