Re: TELNET to HISTORIC Re: FTP

["touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, all,

On Jul 11, 2024, at 9:15 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:

To respond quickly to a couple of other comments:

* I hope and assume Brian was joking, but... Unless we intend
to create a new division of the Protocol Police, with Global,
maybe interplanetary, enforcement authority and mechanisms to
immediately disconnect or imprison any user who dares to try
to use the protocol and to fine any developer who dares to
including a Telnet client or interface in its offerings,
making Telnet historic would not get port 23 back.  Instead,
it would create serious interoperability problems as soon as
something else tried to use that port for another purpose.

Wearing the hat of IANA ports review team lead, please note that the process for port deassignment is defined in Sec 8.2 of RFC 6335.

Given the widespread deployment of telnet, even moving it to historic today would have no effect on the potential reassignment of port 23. The port would still be assigned to telnet until there were sufficient evidence that the port were not in use - and even then, it would be at best marked Reserved until a need arose, e.g., we run out of unassigned ports.

As a fun statistic, since the development of BCP165 (RFC6335 and RFC7605), the allocation rate has been very stable at 15/year. Given our current pool of over 41K unassigned user ports, we won’t need to reuse de-assigned ports for over 2,700 years.

Joe

—

Dr. Joe Touch, temporal epistemologist

www.strayalpha.com