*BSD News Article 78706


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From: thuerman@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de (Urs Thuermann)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Ports and ?
Date: 20 Sep 1996 16:20:40 +0200
Organization: TU Braunschweig, Informatik (Bueltenweg), Germany
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In-reply-to: change@sprynet.com's message of Fri, 20 Sep 1996 05:28:41 GMT
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In article <51t9vg$4di@juliana.sprynet.com> change@sprynet.com writes:

> I am a new computer junkie, who cannot find the answer to this
> question. What are ports exactly? Port 21 is the FTP port on a TCP/IP
> network, and I have heard the term "ported software" but I do not
> understand it.

uh.  "Ported" software has absolutely nothing to do with "ports" in
the TCP and UDP protocols.  Ported software is just software that has
been written for one computer/operating system and has then been
portet or adapted to another.

Port in TCP and UDP are distiguishing different applications using the
TCP and UDP protocols.  Two applications using TCP have different port
numbers.  An application which wants to connect to some other
application on another computer has to know its port number.  Some
port numbers are assigned, e.g. ftp always is on port 21, telnet is on
23, and so on.

> Does anyone know of a resource for this information, or
> can anyone recommend a journal or textbook on the subject (and others,
> of course).

I found the IPC primer, describing the BSD socket interface, which I
found in the SunOS documents, a very good start to understand
networking.

urs