Re: Questions about draft-lear-iana-no-more-well-known-ports-00.txt

[David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org>]

Hi,

On May 24, 2006, at 4:06 PM, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 24, 2006 03:11:29 PM +0200 Eliot Lear  
> <lear at cisco.com> wrote:
> > Yes, the distinction between well known ports and just assigned  
> > ports is
> > outdated.  The overarching theme of the document is that the IANA  
> > should
> > be treated as a group of adults

Heh.  :-)

> > and that they should use some discretion
> > with oversight only where needed.
>
> Careful here...
>
> (1) The IANA is a group of adults, but it is no longer a group of
>    protocol subject matter experts.  IMHO there is probably no need
>    for IESG oversight of port number allocation, especially if we are
>    eliminating the (artificial) scarcity of so-called well-known  
> ports.

The scarcity of ports is not artificial.  There are only 16 bits of  
port space and changing the number of bits in ports will be ...  
interesting.

> (2) As I understand it, for ports above 1024, the IANA does _not_  
> assign
>    values - it just registers uses claimed by others.

This is not accurate.  The IESG has been explicit in that IANA  
assigns port numbers (both well known and user), it does not register  
use.

> Second, I believe that having a complete, accurate registry of port  
> numbers is highly valuable.

As do I.  It does not currently exist.

> That means that they won't be known to network administrators or  
> network traffic analysis tools,

Of course, the port registry does nothing to stop any protocol using  
any port.

It might be useful to figure out what function folks expect the IANA  
port registry to perform.

Rgds,
-drc


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