On *nix systems there's a file (usually /etc/services) that maps protocol/service names to ports. Back in the 90s I was working as a solutions architect for a

On *nix systems there's a file (usually /etc/services) that maps protocol/service names to ports. Back in the 90s I was working as a solutions architect for a Bay Area software company and among other duties I occasionally would help install the software at client sites (think big telcos). One component of the system relied on a service name to identify a port to talk to another component (I think to do a licensing check). For some reason there was no direct way to just specify a port number, so the standard method of installation included editing /etc/services to add the mapping. Editing that file requires root permissions, which at most customers meant I had to get a sysadmin to actually do that step, but it's a simple text file (much like /etc/hosts) so it only takes them a minute to do it once I could get their attention. At one customer I ran into a sysadmin who simply refused, and said if we wanted to be in /etc/services we needed to get the IANA to allocate us a port and then we needed to get the Unix vendor (I think Sun in this particular case) to update their distribution. If even possible this process would take months at best. After wasting almost $20,000 of my time on this (what the client paid my employer, not what I got paid sadly) someone in the org finally arranged for that one particular machine to no longer be that sysadmin's responsibility, and found someone else to make the edit. His final passive aggressive act was to change the motd of that machine to something like "This machine is not managed by the sysadmin team and should not be used for any business critical operations".