bwhite@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu (Bill White ) (10/08/90)
As part of a project, I need to choose a socket number for a program I'm working on. So, what I'd like to find out is which sockets are already in use generally. I know about everything in /etc/services, obviously; what I *would* like to know is about popular programs that are out there. For example, I know IRC often runs on 6667; MUD runs on 6715 on at least one site; etc. Is there a convention for picking an internet socket that will be accepting external connections, or do I have to worry about this? I'd like to pick something that probably isn't in use and isn't going to be picked for something else. So if you know of some in-use sockets in the higher ranges, and/or you have a suggestion for "location", please mail me. My mail address (in case my .signature doesn't get stuck in) is: bwhite@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu | Bill White Internet: bwhite@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu | | ETORRE'S OBSERVATION: | | The other line moves faster. |
brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) (10/09/90)
Past the low-number range allocated by the IETF, there are no real standards. BSD systems define IPPORT_USERRESERVED in <netinet/in.h>, 50000 on some machines and 5000 on others; if you ask the system for a port by binding to port 0, you'll get something lower than USERRESERVED. So for maximum portability, you should pick a number above 50000. It would be better if there were a central authority that allocated nonstandard ports; I believe the IETF has refused to do this. Another solution would be to have each machine translate services into ports, through some sort of yellow pages; but this doesn't solve the namespace management problem. ---Dan