(Basics of Networking) What is a Port?

ikernelpro4

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To clarify this quickly: This is a question, not a guide or explanation!
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As a beginner, it can almost feel incredible hard to get into Networking and IT-Security.
Words are being used all other the place and as a beginner, you only have a limited knowledge of those keywords like SMTP or ftp.
With very limited I mean VERY SMALL, like knowing that E-Mails use SMTP and that you can transfer files via FTP and that's it...
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Is there any tutorial, guide (video preferred, maybe with try and output) of what ports are without using strong / a lot of technical terms like SMTP or SSH since a beginner doesn't even know what those protocols are.
Why ports? Well I believe that ports are the first step to get into Networking.

If there's a whole series about more topics, that'd awesome!
 
Will dispense u the jargons, which u can look up on the Internet, and give u my folksy explanation of ports, cuz I had trouble making sense of it at the beginning myself.

Ports are part of the tcp/ip protocol. To so something, to ask for service, you say I want to talk to IP x.x.x.x and I want service port y. I want to say some of this came from unix but not absoletely sure, and then *somebody* said OK, port 21 is service FTP, port 25 is email smtp, u can look up the often used ports yourself.

And then there are the unused ports, the dynamically assigned ports. When all these was invented there was no torrent back then. So when torrent came along, they just picked a range of unused ports for torrent to use, but this is flexible, if you don't run torrent at all, you are free to use those ports for whatever your hearts desires.

Ports when it comes to firewalls, routing, NAT. When you go to a website, the destination site only see your public ip, so how does it knows it's coming from pc1 on your LAN, or pc2, or pc3? PORTS. Your browser picks a random port for this request so the destination site knows, when it replies, to use your public ip + the port dynamically assigned so it can get back to the correct pc.

Well, the explanation wasn't so short but it's less techie than if u Google it I hope.
 

ikernelpro4

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@jsmithepa still too tech-heavy. Imagine explaining what ports are in a presentation and you got a non IT people in there. See what I mean?
You need to make an example like what ports and SMTP are similar to in the real world etc...