[Techtalk] Port question

[mgmonza at sdf.lonestar.org]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2014, James Sutherland wrote:

> 
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2014, at 04:51 AM, mgmonza at sdf.lonestar.org wrote:
>> Hi, all,
>><<
>> A representative set of lines from iftop look like this:
>> (none of these ip addresses is mine)
>>
>> none.local:35930                => iad23s07-in-f1.1e100.net:www        0b
>> none.local:43850                => yk-in-f101.1e100.net:www            0b
>> none.local:33935                => 67.220.127.199:https                0b
>
> Those are all *outgoing* connections: you connected to ports 80 ("www")
> and 443 ("https") of those machines.
>
> 1e100 is a very large number known as a Googol, and 1e100.net is the
> domain Google uses for all their back-end systems. So, those first two
> entries are connections from your machine to Google's web servers:
> nothing suspicious about that.

>>snip<<
>
> The third entry,  67.220.127.199, is the North Carolina State Library.
> (snip)
>
>> Now I'm really depressed - looks like it may be worse than I
>> thought.
>
> Don't be depressed: all these entries indicate is that you use a Google
> web service and were doing something on the NC State Library system!
>

Thanks, James - all good and useful info.  I thought someone had 'zombied' 
my computer and was using it to connect out.  It's a major relief to know 
that's not the case, still a minor letdown to know my attempts to 
de-googlefy all my browsers haven't quite succeeded.

I checked /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts (just for grins);  NCState's is 
not in either, although SDF's DNSs are still in resolv.conf as backup. 
One of the pages from the ixquick search must have accessed NCSU.

I know all this is at a woefully elementary level.  Thanks again for the 
information and the reassurance.

MG