Port Squatting: Don't irk your local sysadmin

摘要

A few years ago you upbraided some developers for not following the correct process when requesting a reserved network port from IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). While I get that squatting a used port is poor practice, I wonder if you, yourself, have ever tried to get IETF to allocate a port. We recently went through this with a new protocol on an open-source project, and it was a nontrivial and frustrating exercise. While I wouldn't encourage your readers to squat ports, I can see why they might just look for unallocated ports on their own and simply start using those, with the expectation that if their protocols proved popular, they would be granted the allocations later.