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I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

gregraiz.com

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Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#161

Post by pratyahava »

mrhottakes wrote: post #137
pratyahava wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i know, but the OP's goal was to host/access http(s) services with names and avoid port numbers, and gopher service name was chosen by me as an example. my point was that /etc/services cannot be used for the OP's need. if you host an http(s) service on port 11111 you can reach it with url http://127.1:11111 , but url http://127.1:vce/ would not work in most software. $ grep 11111 /etc/services vce 11111/udp # Viral C…

If I curl my phone number it doesn't connect, that's strange

can you please explain what you mean by this? because technically i do not see any similarity in this "analogy".

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#162

Post by pratyahava »

halJordan wrote: post #147
maeglin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top reply, and clearly based on the article's title rather than its content, as are the follow-ups. You're making this site worse. The article is short; go read it then come back and delete.

The article is about the dude not knowing what service is where so he codes a json mapping. He could just update his /etc/services for the same thing. Oh but wait, he mentioned ai agents that changes everything!

can you please demonstrate the workflow you are suggesting? asking because i tried what you suggest, and it does not work.

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#163

Post by allarm »

magicalhippo wrote: post #154
allarm wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I mean you just have to have something on the transport layer, you can't just encapsulate application layer into network skipping network, that's not how the network stack works.

Perhaps it's because I'm tired but I can't make sense of your objection. As I said you could implement it by having TCP/UDP as is, just with a fixed port number. This wouldn't be unlike the myriad of other conventions that litter IPv6, such as using /64 for a host or ULA's having a certain prefix.

No it's me - I'm tired too, and I misread you)

Got it, makes sense. It just seems more like an architectural decision to me than something related to the network stack - that's why I got confused. You can come up with your own convention and use it within a local network. One of the downsides of this approach - it will clutter up the routing table, but that’s probably not a big deal.

I usually prefer to use some kind of demultiplexer, like a reverse proxy, to handle the conversions.

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#164

Post by skydhash »

pratyahava wrote: post #159
skydhash wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The names are the kind of servers that listen on those ports (by default) like ssh, telnet, http, and smtp. They are not subdomains or for URI parsing.

URI contains ":port" tho, but practically it is only digital number. the OP made a tool which helps them to avoid using port numbers. people commented in a way that looked like laughing at him, like he reinvented the wheel, and talking about /etc/services. well ok, i decided to try using /etc/services for the purpose of using names instead of port numbers. would it be possible to add "myapp 60001/tcp" to /etc/service…

Maybe the joke has gotten too far, but the point that most people have been trying to say is that the issue that the OP is trying to solve has been solved for years. It's called a reverse proxy. Doing the configuration automatically like OP does does not alter the fact that it is a reverse proxy. `/etc/services` serve a different purpose.

Also URL parsing is a completely different matter. Browsers are primarily an HTTP(s) client. If you do not mention the ":port", it will try to connect to 80 (HTTP) or HTTPS (443). Because that the default ports for a web server. Other services have different port. So if your URL has the ftp scheme, the default port would be 21.

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#165

Post by tolciho »

pratyahava wrote: post #157
mrhottakes wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you need an AI agent that can determine whether http and gopher are the same protocol

if you configure sshd to listen on port 443, does it become an https server? i was just trying to demondtrate: pick any port from /etc/services and try to use the name instead of port number. no, it does not work well when trying to use for local-hosting http(s) services. so to address the irony and sarcasm of the messages i was replying to: zdw: It's like someone should make a file... maybe in /etc ... and put short…

Many clients also do not support getservent(3) or portmap or DNS SRV records or NIS or LDAP or ActiveDirectory so one might wonder why there are so many half-baked, failed, or overy complicated attempts at solving whatever the problem is here even before "AI has entered the chat".

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#167

Post by nullsanity »

rdevilla wrote: post #65
zdw wrote: post #6

It's like someone should make a file... maybe in /etc ... and put short names for services in it... maybe it could be called /etc/services...

Not modern enough. Unix is too low level, antiquated, and discriminates against those who just want to get shit done instead of reading manpages or documentation by hand.

[dead]

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#168

Post by pratyahava »

chuckadams wrote: post #93
pratyahava wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ipv6 packet does not have any port field. ports are on the level of tcp and udp, and you don't have to use tcp or udp on top of ipv6. ipv4 packet does not have any port information as well.

tcp6 is a thing though, was created at the same time as ipv6, and it does have ports, along with udp6. But if you really want one ip per stream and just hardwire port 1 or something, it's not like IPv6 does anything to stand in the way of that. Mght have performance issues on some OS's binding thousands of IPs to one interface, but that's on them to fix. Bigger lift would be the APIs that would need to change to mana…

afaik tcp and udp are the same on top of ipv6 as they are on top of ipv4, there are no tcp6 and udp6, the "6" suffix just hints they are comminucated on top of ipv6, but the packets are the same as before, no new standards.

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#169

Post by npodbielski »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #56
npodbielski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exact problem I see with all of those vibe coded software: In few years everything will be super fragmented, everyone will be using their own set of tools, or vibe coding them, themselves. Communication between teams or even between team members will become very hard because of those differences. 'What do you mean production is down? On my vibe coded dashboard everything is green!'

Why do people always assume that change is permanent? It's never. After decentralisation we always see decentralisation. After a period of growth, a decline will follow. After the vibe coding hype, consolidation will follow. After rain comes sunshine.

Well, I am forty years old. In twenty years I won't be working. We are in the dawn of AI software. If this will be decentralisation it will be at least 10 years of that. Probably more. So if fifteen or twenty years things will be going back to 'our normal' as we see today, I won't be concerned about all of it that much anymore. Perspective change with age considerably.

Re: I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

#170

Post by chuckadams »

pratyahava wrote: post #168
chuckadams wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tcp6 is a thing though, was created at the same time as ipv6, and it does have ports, along with udp6. But if you really want one ip per stream and just hardwire port 1 or something, it's not like IPv6 does anything to stand in the way of that. Mght have performance issues on some OS's binding thousands of IPs to one interface, but that's on them to fix. Bigger lift would be the APIs that would need to change to mana…

afaik tcp and udp are the same on top of ipv6 as they are on top of ipv4, there are no tcp6 and udp6, the "6" suffix just hints they are comminucated on top of ipv6, but the packets are the same as before, no new standards.

I could have sworn there was a different and simplified format for segments (datagrams are already about as simple as they can be), but I apparently had hallucinated it all these years. Turns out the only difference is using the larger addresses in the checksum algorithm.

Still, I do have to wonder about a port-free world. Seems a lot of things would get simpler.

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