Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!labrea!jade!saturn!ssyx!koreth
From: koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: inet port numbers
Message-ID: <1495@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Date: 25 Dec 87 07:51:22 GMT
References: <1480@saturn.ucsc.edu> <1374@ea.ecn.purdue.edu>
Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu
Reply-To: koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm)
Organization: The American Redundancy Society of America
Lines: 36
Keywords: registry

In article <1374@ea.ecn.purdue.edu> davy@ea.ecn.purdue.edu.UUCP (Dave Curry) writes:
>In article <1480@saturn.ucsc.edu> koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) writes:
>>With all the interest in interprocess communication nowadays, there are bound
>>to be some port number clashes between peoples' programs.  What does everyone
>>think of starting up a registry for port numbers?  
>
>Swell idea.  So swell, in fact, that the Network Information Center
>already does it.  They publish the numbers every so often (6 months?)
>as a Request for Comments; the most recent is RFC1010, I believe.  You
>can get this by using anonymous FTP to SRI-NIC.ARPA, and grabbing the
>file RFC:RFC1010.TXT.
>
>The folks who answer mail to NIC@SRI-NIC.ARPA could probably tell you
>all about just exactly what numbers they register, etc.  I believe
>there are restrictions on some things (like, they only register ports
>below 1024 or something).

In fact, they only register ports below 256, which is why another registry
seems like a good idea.  Here at UCSC (and, I suspect, at many other sites),
there are quite a number of user-developed programs that use IPC; since they
aren't owned by the system administrators, they aren't installed by the
superuser.  Of course, that means they can't sit on privileged port numbers,
which means the NIC doesn't register them.  What I'm proposing is an unofficial
registry for such programs.

(By the way, the RFCs are interesting reading; I encourage anyone interested
in the innards of the internet to poke around in the archives.  There's a lot
of information there.)

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