Subject: [newtrk] ... and, speaking of cruft ...

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 12:38:31 -0500

Dear All,

We are having a conversation in BEHAVE about port number ranges, and I 
happened to look at http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers. I 
DID see a couple of notes about port numbers that had been reclaimed, 
but does this happen more often than once in a blue moon?

Just wondering ...

Spencer 

.
newtrk resources:_____________________________________________________
web user interface: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/newtrk.html
mhonarc archive: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/newtrk/index.html

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From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 11:07:03 -0700

At 12:38 PM -0500 10/2/04, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
>We are having a conversation in BEHAVE about port number ranges, and 
>I happened to look at http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers. 
>I DID see a couple of notes about port numbers that had been 
>reclaimed, but does this happen more often than once in a blue moon?

Why should it? There is a high risk of accidentally removing 
something that someone is still using, and there are plenty of port 
numbers available for assignment. What value would we get for the 
risk?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
.

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Oct 2004 14:36:28 -0400

--On Saturday, 02 October, 2004 11:07 -0700 "Paul Hoffman /
VPNC" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> We are having a conversation in BEHAVE about port number
>> ranges, and  I happened to look at
>> http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers.  I DID see a
>> couple of notes about port numbers that had been  reclaimed,
> something that someone is still using, and there are plenty of
> port numbers available for assignment. What value would we get
> for the risk?

Indeed, having just asked IANA to release one for which I was
the designated stuckee, I think the only safe conditions for
doing so involve ports that were designated only for a private
protocol or corporate purpose, where that activity/purpose has
been abandoned, and where the risk of abuse via firewalls or
filters that try to accept registered ports but not others
therefore exceeds the minimal-to-zero possibility of use of the
protocol.

But having IANA, or the IESG, go into the "reclaiming" business
strikes me as a really bad idea _and_ as a poor use of
resources.  If we have too few ports in IPv4 to adopt a "numbers
are cheap" attitude, we need to right now, really quickly, fix
IPv6 as needed to eliminate the problem.

     john

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 14:03:21 -0500

> numbers available for assignment. What value would we get for the 

It was just a question! :-)

Spencer 

.

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Oct 2004 15:59:25 -0400

The only area where I know there has been serious work on reclaiming 
IETF-controlled numbers is in DHCP options.

Certainly not in ports.

                     Harald

--On 2. oktober 2004 12:38 -0500 Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> happened to look at http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers. I DID
> see a couple of notes about port numbers that had been reclaimed, but
> does this happen more often than once in a blue moon?
>
> Just wondering ...
>
> Spencer
>
> .

.

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 06:45:31 -0500

From BEHAVE...

It looks like they've figured out the Right Answer on their own.

"We now return you to your regularly-scheduled ..." what is it we do?

Spencer

From: "Cullen Jennings" <[email-masked]>
To: "Jonathan Rosenberg" <[email-masked]>; "Francois Audet" 
<[email-masked]>
Cc: "Behave" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 10:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Ietf-behave] port-type preservation?

On 10/1/04 6:55 PM, "Jonathan Rosenberg" <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> Ideally, I would say that a NAT shouldn't map into well-known port 
> or
> into ports in the registered range that are in fact registered. I
> suspect that this is an unreasonable requirement, since no nat 
> vendor is
> going to want to periodially download the iana port assignment page 
> and
> figure out whether a new port is assigned.

I think that requirement would be hard to meet. For one thing, a quick
glance at

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

makes it look like a large percentage of the ports are assigned and 
running
out of ports is a real issue for large NATs. Anyone know how many are 
free?

I guess I have not heard any harm that comes from François' proposal 
of only
using 1024 to 65k so I sort of lean that direction. 

.