[Gllug] sorts of ports

[tet at accucard.com]

>I suppose there must be historical reasons for it (perhaps there are
>logical ones also?) but why couldn't the IP packet header just request
>http/ssh/ftp or whatever directly (e.g. by including the string "http")
>instead of going via an arbitrary "port" number? Is it just to save
>space in the IP headers?

No (although it does that as well). It also allows you to run multiple
instances of a given server type on a machine. Using your scheme, you'd
only be able to have one http server per machine, for example. Yes, for
http you can use virtual hosts to solve some of those problems, but not
all, and apart from anything else, all the world isn't http (to paraphrase
Martin Guy very badly).

Tet

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