Windows vs Empirical Ports

And I was doing so good about updating at least once a week. Actually I’ve had a post to make about books and TV, I just haven’t done it. Lazy=10203, Me=0.

This quicky is about how to stop Windows for pouncing on high ports that you need. I use NSClient to do cacti and almost all the time it works great, but today after a BES update I noticed that my BES server stopped responding to the cacti queries. Head over to the server, give it a quick reboot and still no look. Do a little more digging (netstat) and I notice that ms-sql-s is talking on 1248 (the nsclient port). Looks like sql is starting before the first nsclient poll and so windows takes the port for sql. Suck. Turns out there’s a way to block tcp port, by range, in windows by editing the registry (go figure). Read and lean. I haven’t figured out if it can be used for more then one range yet, I don’t want to keep rebooting my running BES server, but I do plan on doing some tests soon enough to see if I can add multiple ranges. I might never use this feature again, but it’s good to know that it’s in there and how it works.