Inside Citrix® MetaFrame XP™: A System Administrator's Guide to Citrix MetaFrame XP/1.8™ and Windows® Terminal Services

Changing Terminal Server and MetaFrame Listening Ports

For better security, some administrators choose to change the listening port numbers of their Terminal Servers to an obscure port number, rather than the standard. This makes it significantly more difficult for a casual hacker to identify the servers.

For a hacker to gain access to your network from the outside, he must first gather information about your network. One very common practice is for a hacker to do a port scan of your firewall or your Internet-exposed devices. If a hacker sees port 1494 open, he knows for sure that it is a Citrix MetaFrame server. If he sees port 3389 open, he knows that it is a Terminal Server. This is important information for the hacker. When the hacker has ...