[Gllug] sorts of ports

[Paul Brazier]

> That's a good idea, but instead of making these unique service
> identifiers strings, we could assign a number to each service. 'http'
> could be '80', for instance. Ooops, port numbers again.

Well, to the computer strings are numbers really underneath as well. I
suppose it's a case of using the /etc/services (?) file to translate
"ports" to daemons instead of using ASCII. Although it doesn't even need
to know ASCII to compare two strings (e.g. if the header contains
"httpd" then notify "httpd" or whatever), it just makes it more
"human-readable".
I suppose when it was invented diskspace/bandwidth etc was very precious
and human-readability wasn't an issue. Now with XML etc the trend is
swinging the other way.

(Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm talking about :-) but maybe
it's good sometimes to have a view without pre-conceived ideas)
 
> More seriously, your scheme does not permit running services on
> non-standard ports (perhaps several such), and offers no advantages.

Surely it caters in theory for an _infinite_ number of "ports" - if you
run a server called "asdfasdf", this string *is* the port, and just
looks for/is sent IP packets with "asdfasdf" in the header.

It wouldn't allow multiple http servers to run on one machine (on
different "ports") but would you need this? Doesn't inetd sort this out
or something?


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