On Feb 16, 2010, at 8:52 AM, Martin Swany wrote:

Beside describing the transport protocol, which document is to defined
the preferred TCP server ports for a given service? I presume the
documents describing the individual services should define the later.

There are conventions, but as the are registered in the information
service, they can change. The conventions could be added as
informative text, as you suggest.

I'm not sure there are really conventions so much as folks have just picked things.

Port choice is also heavily dependent on the implementation, e.g. if a service were implemented as a single MA instance containing ping, bandwidth, latency and utilization data vs. 4 separate services each containing one of the data types, the ports would be different even though the data you can obtain is the same. Thinking in terms of the metrics, I'm not sure it makes sense to say "get ping data on port 8065" or "get snmp data on port 8075" or whatever.

All told, I'd rather get folks into the mindset of doing a lookup to find the location of information vs. assuming that "There's ping data on host X, ergo I connect to port 8065 to get it".

Cheers,

Aaron

Internet2 Spring Member Meeting
April 26-28, 2010 - Arlington, Virginia
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