4 ms·

Critical how? Its just an informal agreement. Its just a 16bit number.

• beaconstudios 9y ago
  critical in the sense of avoiding collisions between protocols. Imagine if redis and mysql had ended up with the same default port, and how much of a nightmare that would be.
  • ams6110 9y ago
    It would only mean you could not run redis and mysql on the same host, and your default assumption about what port to connect to might be wrong 50% of the time. Easily handled, though. There are certainly cases of different software using the same unprivileged ports by default. It's probably more rare for the privileged ports.
  • antocv 9y ago
    Who runs redis and mysql on public facing ports? Whats the big deal if you run ssh on port 443 as many do, together with nginx on the same port? Or if you run a web-server on port 22 and irc on 21.
    • coldtea 9y ago
      >Whats the big deal if you run ssh on port 443 as many do, together with nginx on the same port? The deal is that if we're talking of TPC apps on a single network interface, you can't. The deal is also that it's handy to know where you can expect to see a common service running.
      • icebraining 9y ago
        The deal is that if we're talking of TPC apps on a single network interface, you can't. No, but you can fake it with sslh: http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh.shtml http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh.shtml