The whole idea of fixed ports is broken.
The idea that there are only 1024 or even 65535 Internet applications is
broken.
agree with you so far.
The Internet has a signalling layer, the DNS. Applications should use it.
strongly disagree. DNS is a huge mess. It is slow and unreliable. In
practice it is often inconsistent both from one query location to
another and with reality.
only the host knows which application is listening on which port. if
there is going to be a layer of indirection between service name and
service selector, it's extremely bad design to put that layer of
indirection external to the host that's providing the service. (now if
you want to argue that an architecture really needs to support clusters
of hosts all providing the same service, I'd agree, but DNS is still not
a good way to do this.)
The SRV record provides an infinitely extensible mechanism for advertising
ports.
yes, and is not backward compatible with most applications. also, for
some reason, few new applications want to use it.
Fixed ports do not work behind NAT.
irrelevant. lots of things do not work behind NAT. NATs are inherently
broken and cannot be fixed. they are an architectural dead end.
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