Hi,
As has been dicussed on this list in April, Linux does not follow the
IANA recommendation to use port number 49152 and higher for dynamic
ports. Albert D. Cahalan suggested changing the current range of 1024
till 4999 into 51024 till 514999. David Miller said 'Ok, this needs to
be fixed then.' but Andi Kleen objected that the change would cause
problems with poorly configured packes filters.
Since then, it has been quiet about the topic, and the kernel has not
been changed.
I would like to argue in favour of changing the range: first, it's the
'right' thing to do. Secondly, the old range generates problems with
applications that expect to be able to bind to 'their' port. In
particular, I've experienced failures with HylaFAX, because the faxmail
delivery agent uses port 4558, which at random times already was
occupied.
Thirdly, it's trivial to get back the old range with sysctl if you need
compatibilty with broken packet filters.
There is still time to do this IANA compliancy change now, once 2.4.0 is
out we have to wait until at least 2.6, which may be a rather long
time.
Regards,
Bastiaan Bakker
LifeLine Networks BV
PS. could you please CC replies to me, as I'm not subscribed to the
list.
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