closing the port registry considered harmful (was Re: Guidance needed on well known ports)

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

> Refusing new registrations is what I meant by closing the registry.

This would be a disaster.  It would mean that application designers 
would just pick ports at random (some do this already) and there would 
be no mechanism for preventing conflicts.

Regarding SRV, it's not acceptable to expect that as a condition of 
deploying a new application, every user who wishes to run that 
application be able to write to a DNS zone.  Most users do not have DNS 
zones that they can write to.

Furthermore it's increasingly necessary that applications be able to 
work in environments that do not use DNS - such as ad hoc networks or 
networks that become isolated.

> We should also promote the use of srv for existing protocols for 
> configuration. _pop3._tcp.example.com can only advertise the location of 
> the pop server. Why not use it and save me debugging mail config for 
> friends and familly?

Because it will degrade interoperability and cause inconsistent behavior 
between different mail clients.

Keith


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