My Service Port Number from IANA

Let me hao lian about my personal port number. I was just reading about CARP, the Common Address Resolution Protocol, this afternoon and learnt about how they failed to secure a protocol number from IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), so they had to hijack someone else’s protocol number. Then I remembered how I secured for myself a port number from IANA. I know, a port number is not quite the same thing as a protocol number, but still, it is something interesting and notable to look back on.

Now, I see my name published in the /etc/services file distributed with some operating systems, such as like Snow Leopard. On other Unix systems, perhaps only the port assignment information is listed without any name or contact detail. Nevertheless, the whole thing is listed verbatim at IANA’s port number listing.

This was for a project I was working on in 1996/1997. That’s like over 12 years ago. It had a promising value proposition. Interesting that today there is still not something like this idea implemented commercially. The reality is that what works well as a research idea may not work out on the commercial front. Things like IPv6 is still struggling with real-world adoption, multicast on the Internet is essentially non-existant.

Yeah, there is not much point in this post, except to remind myself that there is a piece of my handiwork, even if it doesn’t amount to much, that’s now part of the Internet.