Use of port 433 for news transport

[bill davidsen]

In article <B07BB447BEDED411A49D0008C7E691E2022E5114 at aples3.jhuapl.edu>,
Humes, David  G. <David.Humes at jhuapl.edu> wrote:

| The news server that I inherited was configured to accept its feeds on port
| 433.  We're in the process of switching over to a new ISP and they are
| giving me grief on delivering my feed on anything but 119.  They're running
| Cyclone 1.4.2 and it looks like it's trivial to send a feed on an alternate
| port.  So, I don't understand the resistance.

  Likewise... We use 433 for feed everywhere we go, and it's no problem
with Cyclone, Twister, INN, Diablo or Earthquake. It's a number, not a
way of life.

|                                            But, I am curious about the
| history of port 433.  From what I can determine at some point it was
| considered desirable to have separate port numbers for newsreaders and news
| routing agents.  Seems like a reasonable idea.  Did it every make it into a
| draft?

  I have no idea on that. I believe that IANA assigned port 433 for
news feeding, so it's official.

|         Is the use of port 433 becoming more or less common?  Depending on
| the answer to the previous question, would it be a good idea to convert my
| other feeds to deliver on 119?

  The advantage is that you can run nnrpd as a daemon instead of a
process started by innd. That presents a savings in the startup
overhead when someone connects, since the reader daemon just does a
fork (vfork?) and on most systems that's a tiny overhead, then does
copy-on-write as things change.

  How much that helps depends on your readers, if they open a socket
and use it hard, no saving to measure, if they have clients which open
a socket per group, or open and close a socket for each article read,
then the saving becomes a visible drop in the load average.

  I hate giving those "it depends" answers.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.