Network Port Open but No Process Attached – Troubleshooting

linuxnagiosnetstatnetworkingopsview

I have a weird situation going on with an open network port. My main question is, why would there not be a program associated with an open TCP port:

netstat -ln --program
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address               Foreign Address             State       PID/Program name   
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5666                0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN      -

For my specific case, there is supposed to be an nrpe daemon (opsview install) listening on port 5666, but there is no nrpe daemon running. If I try to start it, it exits immediately.

lsof -i :5666 doesn't show any output either. There is no (x)inetd running on my system.

UPDATE

Yes, I was running those commands as root. Telnet would could, but there was never any response.

After further investigation, I found a kernel error in dmesg: this was an EC2 instance (actually several of them) running an older kernel (2.6.16 is apparently unstable). The fix to stop the crash was to upgrade kernels.

It looks like the way the kernel crashed caused the process to go away and leave the port open.

Best Answer

Ports open by the kernel won't show up with program name. Some NFS and OCFS stuff come to mind. Maybe it's something like that?

Or it could be a kernel bug. Check kernel logs for OOPS and BUG.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to tell what process has a specific port open on Linux

As well as Netstat, mentioned in other posts, the lsof command should be able to do this just fine. Just use this:

lsof -i :<port number>

and all of the processes should come up. I use it on OS X quite frequently.

Debian Administration article for lsof

Linux port not accessible from remote machine

My guess is it's a firewall issue. To diagnose, either switch to root or use sudo to execute these commands described below:

Firstly, service iptables status will show you your current rules. Depending on how esoteric your firewall rules are, you may need to add them into the main question to debug but essentially you're looking for a line that accepts TCP port 8800 prior to a line that rejects all connections.

e.g.

Table: filter
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
num  target     prot opt source       destination
...
14   ACCEPT     tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0    0.0.0.0/0      state NEW tcp dpt:8800
15   REJECT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0    0.0.0.0/0      reject-with icmp-host-prohibited

If you don't have a REJECT line on your input chain, then the firewall is probably already turned off.

One way to get around this is obviously to turn off the firewall (service iptables stop) although this defeats the entire purpose of having a firewall.

If you need to add a new firewall rule, you have a couple of options:

Use the excellent Firewall Configuration tool (system-config-firewall) that ships with Fedora and can be found at the System->Administration->Firewall menu item in Gnome.
On the command line, insert a new rule before the REJECT rule by executing the following (uses numbers from my example above): iptables -I INPUT 15 -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 8800 -j ACCEPT. NOTE that these changes are not permanent and will not persist beyond the next reboot.
Manually edit the /etc/sysconfig/iptables file and add a rule (-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 8800 -j ACCEPT) to the firewall prior to the REJECT rule. Cycle the firewall service to pick up the changes via a service iptables restart. These changes will be applied every time the firewall service is started.

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