Ned Freed wrote:
Mind you, I'm not saying that TCP needs to be redesigned ASAP to allow
> for a
> larger number of source ports. IMO the pain would probably outweigh the
> gain.
> But that doesn't mean nobody is hitting the 65536 limit imposed by
> source port
> numbers. They are, it causes problems, and this needs to be kept in mind.
>
Out of curiosity, doesn't SCTP have a bigger port space (or its
moral equivalent)? If so, would that be a better option?
I have in fact on several occasions proposed using SCTP as a transport for
various email services. I did so no so much to take advantage of the larger
port numbers, but because the multistream support SCTP provides could be
leveraged in several interesting ways. (In fact the multiplexing might
even lessen the need for so many connections.)
However, I've gotten very little traction for these suggestions in the past.
The biggest problem seems to be the lack of SCTP support in quite a few of the
stacks out there. And it is one thing for an application to tack on a layer on
top of TCP like TLS, quite another for an application to add a new network
transport. So the conclusion again seems to be that the costs are greater than
the benefits.
Ned
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