Re: Reminder: WGLC Announcement for draft-ietf-tsvwg-iana-ports-08 - 26th November 2010

[Magnus Westerlund <[e-mail]>]

WG, Paul and Eliot,

I will respond in detail. However, I do need to do a bit of history
digging and and go review the fairly big discussion that was held on the
[e-mail] list back in 2006 that was started by Eliot Lear.

The threads of relevance appears to be:
https://www.ietf.org/ibin/c5i?mid=6&rid=49&gid=0&k1=933&k2=30752&tid=1291193700

https://www.ietf.org/ibin/c5i?mid=6&rid=49&gid=0&k1=933&k2=31742&tid=1291193820

Elliot's individual draft:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lear-iana-no-more-well-known-ports-02

Maybe Eliot can summarize what was the reason his effort failed to gain
sufficient traction to be published?

Cheers

Magnus


Paul Hoffman skrev 2010-11-24 17:27:
> At 5:17 PM +0100 11/24/10, Magnus Westerlund wrote:
>> Paul Hoffman skrev 2010-11-22 23:14:
>>> In general, this document seems fairly worthwhile. I have a two reservations, however:
>>>
>>> - There is no justification for retaining the differentiation between System Ports and User Ports. Given the wide disparity in assignment rates, I would have thought that this would be a good time to say "there is no longer a difference". The text in 8.1 doesn't explain the difference in a way I could discern. At a minimum, this needs to be covered in much more detail in sections 7.1 and 7.2.
>>
>> My personal view is that I agree that there really are no significant
>> difference between the two ranges. There has traditionally been a
>> perceived difference between the two ranges.
> 
> That is only because *we* said there was a difference.
> 
>> Also, isn't there still
>> some difference in what rights are needed on a number of unix systems to
>> install a listener?
> 
> Not in any sane system, no.
> 
>> So I think the difference is in peoples heads. The
>> registration rules do require you to clearly motivate why you should be
>> given a port in the system range.
>>
>> In chapter 6, there is the following text:
>>
>>    Such confirmation of intended use is
>>    especially important when these ports are associated with privileged
>>    (e.g., system or administrator) processes.
>>
>>
>> For the difference in allocation rates there is a reason why there such
>> a low rate for "System" ports, and that is due to the high bar that
>> already is set by the port expert reviewers.
>>
>> We are trying to focus on getting the new registry and its structure in
>> place. Rather than changing all details, like if the system port range
>> should be removed. There was previous discussion on this in IETF without
>> any consensus so we haven't been interested in driving this.
> 
> If not now, while the registry is open, when?
> 
>> I think removing the system ports range is beyond our intentions with
>> this document. Secondly, we can try to clarify the difference between
>> system and registered range.
> 
> In the IETF, tomorrow's tomorrow is never.


-- 

Magnus Westerlund

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