Common Protocols Multicast Addresses Ethernet Numbers Tech Essays Internet Course Solaris Information Misc. IDS Sniffers Vulnerability Scanners Port Scanners Network Monitoring Firewall Ping NetBIOS Password Packet Tools Promiscuous Detection Fingerprinting Phone Steganography HTML NT Misc. A socket is a network communications endpoint.
Sockets come in two primary flavors.
An active socket is connected to a remote active socket via an open data connection. Closing the connection destroys the active sockets at each endpoint. A passive socket is not connected, but rather awaits an incoming connection, which will spawn a new active socket. A socket is not a port, though there is a close relationship between them. Each port can have a single passive socket, awaiting incoming connections, and multiple active sockets, each corresponding to an open connection on the port.