netstat -an what does "listening" means?

[fiigaro]

Trying to open my ports, what does this mean?

is it that these ports are open?

 

[ssali27]

just that its listening for any traffic that may be on there

A Similar discussion I found on another forum:

The 'Foreign Address' is the address at the other end of the connection. If you look at an existing TCP connection (try starting a download just before running it to see what I mean) you'll see the address and port number you're connected to. The 0.0.0.0:0 and *:* values are just placeholders.

LISTENING means that a service is listening for connections on that port. Once a connection is established it will be ESTABLISHED, and you'll have a matching foreign address on the line. Other states you might see during the setup and shutdown stages include SYN_SENT and TIME_WAIT. All that only applies to TCP; because UDP is connectionless there's no state to list.

If it's listed in that table, the port is bound to an application. For TCP, LISTENING indicates the application is just waiting for a connection and any other state is an indicator of a connection (or attempt) to another machine. For UDP, there's no state -- you can't tell from netstat output whether the application is receiving data or not.

 

[ssali27]

There is a service running on that port and it is ready to accept connections. You can refer to a list of common ports if you want elaboration of exactly what services may be listening on those ports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers