Question about chapter 5 in Darril's book

Great book btw, Darril.

My question is about practice question #18.

18. What ports need to be open for a website hosting both encrypted and unencrypted internet traffic.

I knew those were ports 80 and 443. What I was confused about is this concept of inbound and outbound. I chose all four answers but the answer was only the inbound ports. Don't any outbound ports need to opened so the browser can request the website?

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erpadmin

Dave1027 wrote: »

Great book btw, Darril.

My question is about practice question #18.

18. What ports need to be open for a website hosting both encrypted and unencrypted internet traffic.

I knew those were ports 80 and 443. What I was confused about is this concept of inbound and outbound. I chose all four answers but the answer was only the inbound ports. Don't any outbound ports need to opened so the browser can request the website?

It will help make things easy if you think about it from the server's point of view. The server needs to accept inbound, in other words INCOMING traffic, going IN to the server.

Outbound traffic is when you are trying to connect the web server.

Going back to your original question:

What ports need to be open for a website hosting both encrypted and unencrypted internet traffic.

Since this is from the perspective of the server, the server has to be accepting incoming traffic (inbound) with the required ports.

Client goes OUT to INcoming server.

Hopefully that makes better sense.

cisco_nerd

Generally speaking, if you are hosting a web site that supports both secure and insecure access, you would allow connections to these services.

This means that your web server is accepting connections on ports 80 and 443. They are inbound because the server is waiting for connections on those ports.

The question is in relation to the web server, not so much as the user trying to access these services from the public network.

Hopefully this clears things up for you somewhat, and good choice of study material! That book is well praised among TE'ers.

EDIT: seems i just got beaten to the reply

cyberguypr

Two replies and no welcome?

Welcome to the forum, Dave1027

erpadmin

cyberguypr wrote: »

Two replies and no welcome?

Ouch, man...was just trying to help the guy out.

Welcome Dave, and I hope our responses helped you in your understanding of the difference of inbound and outbound in relation to ports.

Dave1027

Thanks. Yes that clears it up.

TNT143

Wow, thanks for the question and answers... that question caught me up a few times!