Sorry in advance for such a noob question, but I'm certainly a noob. My question is what does it mean to LISTEN or ACCEPT on a port as it relates to my example?
EXAMPLE: I have a tomcat server, and It will use port 8080. I want to make sure that port is available for me to use.
What commands should I perform on my unix server and why?
what information would a command like this give me: netstat -an | grep LISTEN
If a port shows up as LISTEN in netstat, it means the port is in use by a server process, so you can't use it. Here is an example:
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:631 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
which shows that port 631 is in use.
Ignore the UNIX type sockets at the end - they are irrelevant.