> - Conclusion 2: There is no reason for standards to uphold the > distinction between <1024 and >1024 any more. I agree that the requirement on UNIX-like systems to be root in order to bind to ports < 1024 is, in hindsight, a Bad Idea - but mostly because of insufficient privilege granularity. I also think that trusting a source port as an indication of anything is a Bad Idea. However, I do think that it's useful for there to be a range of port numbers that are only bound to a socket if an application specifically asks for one of those ports, as this would reduce the potential for accidental conflicts between servers needing to listen to a well-known port and servers for which any port would do. And it would be appropriate for standards to respect this convention and assign well-known ports in the range of ports that would not be bound by default. I also think that it would be reasonable for an OS to require privileges before it would allow an application to bind to certain ports. But those ports would need to be explicitly enumerated somewhere, rather than merely being a range of numbers. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf