Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 17:59:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug <Doug@gorean.org> To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no> Cc: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mentioning RFC numbers in /etc/services Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9907281735570.15263-100000@dt011n65.san.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <xzpu2qrad76.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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On 26 Jul 1999, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za> writes: > > I plan to mention in the comments for each service in /etc/services, the > > latest RFC describing the service. > > Good idea. Hmmmm... I'm not sure what this gets us. Wouldn't it be better to place this kind of information in the man page that you suggest below? As often as /etc/services gets read, do we really want to bloat it with non-functional information? > Don't. Instead, put it in a separate rfc(7) man page which you refer > to in the services(5) man page. Good suggestions all the way around. I'd also like to throw in this link, which is the best RFC repository I've seen on the basis of speed, reliability, and cross-indexing: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/information/rfc.html. If you really want to improve /etc/services, the first commit should be to delete all the extraneous whitespace at the end of the lines. 23$ grep -c ' $' /etc/services 173 25$ grep -c '^I$' /etc/services 97 Next it would be nice if we added entries for things in our system that don't have them. (Hint: what's listening on ports 1022 and 1023?) Then, someone either needs to fix getserv*() so that they accept port ranges like 6000-6063/tcp (much preferred) or roll out those port numbers in /etc/services (yuck). It would also be nice if someone would take another look at bringing our /etc/services file more up to date with IANA (http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/port-numbers). I believe someone has a PR open on this... :) David O'Brien and I were working on it for a while, but we both got busy working on other things. I had a pretty good set of scripts going to produce a workable file in services format from the IANA list, but what I should really do is write one perl script to do it. I fear however that the chance of the file being updated on that kind of scale would be very small (it always meets a lot of resistance) so I'm not sure it would be worth it. Ideas? Comments? Finally I want to urge a lot of caution to anyone who tampers with the file. I learned from painful experience that very small errors can lead to big problems in very unexpected ways. For instance, my ipfw firewall went totally nutso at one point because I had some comments in /etc/services in the wrong format back when I was playing around with it. This is not something to be tampered with lightly. Doug -- On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does. -- Will Rogers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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