5 ms·
At the time TCP/UDP were invented, keeping packet size small was very important. A string or GUID as addressing information would have been out of the question.
by tangent128 10y ago
At the time TCP/UDP were invented, keeping packet size small was very important. A string or GUID as addressing information would have been out of the question.
(If there wasn't a need to distinguish multiple clients on the same machine, we might have only had 255 ports!)
A standard port for HTTP servers is needed, as most HTTP clients don't support DNS SRV records.
That said, in the IPv6 world there's no technical reason you can't just let every service bind a different IP address.
- brokenmachine 10y ago> in the IPv6 world there's no technical reason you can't just let every service bind a different IP address. I'm not a networking expert, but is that true that you can create multiple ip's for a single device using ipv6? Sounds like it would end up very messy.
- p1mrx 10y agoYou can do that, provided that the network routes multiple IPs (or a whole prefix) to the device. It tends to be pretty messy keeping track of all the addresses in the OS configuration, but that's an opportunity for OSes to get better.
- brokenmachine 10y ago> It tends to be pretty messy keeping track of all the addresses in the OS configuration, but that's an opportunity for OSes to get better. Seems like an odd thing to do, create bizarre (unnecessary?) complexities simply as an opportunity for OSes to get better. Are there any advantages to doing it that way?