Computer security Question:

Normally, the netstat program should report information on the status of the networking connections, routing information, etc. With the option -A or -a, it should list all TCP and UDP available connections and servers that are accepting connection. On Windows NT, even though the documentation states otherwise, this is not the case.

There are no simple way to check what services that are running with TCP ports opened to accept connections. Currently the only way to get some information about this is to use a port scanner program and test through each TCP port on the NT machine. This is not a fool proof way of dealing with the problem.

This is a serious problem if you plan to have NT based computers in the firewall environment. You cannot easily hardened them to become bastion hosts, since you are not confident what types of network services that might be reachable from the outside.

It is a confirmed bug in Windows NT 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0. I do not expect Microsoft to fix it soon enough.

Update:
netstat.exe is fixed as of NT4 SP3, but it still shows some strange behavior. For example, on a moderately loaded machine, you can find numerous duplicates of open connections. Why is that?