Need to know which games require which ports? Look no further!
With the wide variety of hardware routers that's available, it's difficult to cover them all. But they all have some allowance for enabling (mapping) necessary ports. Ideally a router that supports Pure Networks' utility Port Magic makes the task of determining ports used by a game a breeze. But what about those that have an older or unsupported device? (i.e. Belkin routers, just to name one =D )
This is where the workshop comes into play. By using only the utilities that come with Windows XP I'll show you how you can see what ports are being used and used by what program. I'll be using a dedicated Battlefield 1942 server for the purposes of this workshop
Every program that you run is issued a unique PID (process ID) by Windows. This number is then used by Windows as a reference to that program and remains referenced until the program is closed or terminated. With the PID we can track down what ports we need to map.
First, run the game that you need to know the ports of. This will open all the ports for us to detect here shortly. Now with the game running, the ports it requires will be open, but only behind your router/firewall.
Now open your Task Manager by hitting Control-Alt-Delete. A dialog will appear:
The default view of the Task Manager doesn't show you the PID column so you need to go to the menu bar, select View, and then select 'Select Columns..'
Be sure the PID (Process Identifier) option is checked. Then click the OK button and the Task Manager will now show you the PID of all running programs.
Now make note of the PID that's been issued to the program your interested in. So since I need to know all the Battlefield 1942 ports, I see that the PID for BF1942.EXE is 39560.
Now that we have our PID, we need to see all the ports that are currently in use. To do this go to your Start button, click Run, in the text box type command and click the OK button. This will open a command shell (aka DOS-Box):
In this window type: netstat -o -a and then hit your enter key. You should see something like:
Depending on what you have running on your machine that accesses or is accessed over the internet, you could see A LOT of information scroll by. But that's fine as there is a scroll bar on the right so we can scroll back if needed.
Now in this window you'll see a lot of information. But we're only interested in 3 of the columns: Proto, Local Address and PID columns. Using the PID we got from the Task Manager of our program, we notice that BF1942.EXE (which is assigned a PID of 39560) has 3 ports in use: 14567, 14690 and 23000.
Now you may wonder why one server has more than one port open. Well every game is different but basically it breaks down to:
1. The main port used to listen for connections
2. A broadcast port (where your server posts itself to a master server therefore advertising the existence of your running server 3. A remote administration port (used by some games to allow administration of a server from another computer over the internet)
For Battlefield 1942, Port 14567 is the main (default) port used by the game to accept connections. Port 14690 is the port used to advertise the existence of your server for others to join and Port 23000 is for the advertising of your server on GameSpy Arcade.
When mapping a port, most routers require you to specify the protocol type to allow on that port (either TCP or UDP), IP of the machine that will be running the server and the port number(s) we want to allow internet traffic on.
Now you'll have to refer to the manuals that came with your equipment on how to do the mappings.
