Which utility is commonly used to display the active network connections, listening ports, and routing table information on a host?

Which utility is commonly used to display the active network connections, listening ports, and routing table information on a host?

• A. Ping
• B. Traceroute
• C. Netstat
• D. Nslookup

Answer: (C)

Netstat is the go-to command for observing the host’s current network state. It reports active connections (including those in progress and established), which ports are listening for incoming connections, and the routing table that shows how packets are forwarded to different networks. This combination lets you quickly diagnose what the system is doing network-wise and how it’s routing traffic. For example, you can run netstat -an to see all sockets with numeric addresses and ports, including listening ones, and netstat -r to display the routing table. While newer tools like ss or ip route offer similar information on many systems, netstat remains the classic option for this purpose. By comparison, ping checks reachability to a host, traceroute reveals the path packets take to a destination, and nslookup queries DNS records; none of these show the host’s current connections and routes.

Netstat is the go-to command for observing the host’s current network state. It reports active connections (including those in progress and established), which ports are listening for incoming connections, and the routing table that shows how packets are forwarded to different networks. This combination lets you quickly diagnose what the system is doing network-wise and how it’s routing traffic. For example, you can run netstat -an to see all sockets with numeric addresses and ports, including listening ones, and netstat -r to display the routing table. While newer tools like ss or ip route offer similar information on many systems, netstat remains the classic option for this purpose. By comparison, ping checks reachability to a host, traceroute reveals the path packets take to a destination, and nslookup queries DNS records; none of these show the host’s current connections and routes.