Legal Port Range

[Darren Tomlinson]

Does anyone know the range(s) of legal port numbers to use within Cloverleaf for inbound threads?  i.e., what is too high, what ranges should you stay away from, etc…

I am currently running 5.3 on AIX5.2

Topic

[Vince Angulo]

I do recall reading that Cloverleaf uses 13000-13500 for host server assignments.

We’ve had one vendor who needed to use a port in th 55000 range, which posed no problem.

We are on CIS 5.4, AIX 5.3

[Steve Carter]

As a rule of thumb, I stay away from 4 digit port numbers.  Especially since many in the lower end of the 4 digit range are reserved.  You’ll obviously want to stay away from the low 13000’s since that’s what the HostServer uses.

The other range that you’ll definitely want to avoid is the ephemeral range.  You can find this by running the following command:

no -a | grep tcp_ephemeral

The default on AIX is 32768-65535.

The port numbers in this range are in a ‘pool’ that is available to the OS.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Hope this helps.

Steve

[Darren Tomlinson]

i do some localhost copying from site to site for ADTs.  i was using high numbers like 88901.  the other day one stopped working that used to work before.  Quovadx support said that the number was too high, but couldn’t give me a reason why it used to work.  i have a bunch of localhost copies that run in the 99000 and 88000 range.

if i run a netstat, nothing seems to be higher that 60,000ish.  does cloverleaf reassign the 88901 to a new number?

[garry r fisher]

Hi,

65535 is the highest port number available. I suspect the kernal is reassigning the number by subtracting 65535 but I’m not 100% on that.

Regards

Garry

[Jason Melton]

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

Is a good starting point for those to avoid.

Regards,

Jason

[John Mercogliano]

Darren,

  I had the same problem and I determined that QDX was converting the number to hex and only using the first 4 digits at least on HP-UX.  I would not be supprised if you found 23365 as the port that was actually assigned.  As far as valid port numbers to use look at this link:

http://www.ncftp.com/ncftpd/doc/misc/ephemeral_ports.html” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.ncftp.com/ncftpd/doc/misc/ephemeral_ports.html

It depend on your OS but you should not use ports below 1024 or within the Ephemeral Port Range for your system.  

Hope this helps

John Mercogliano
Sentara Healthcare
Hampton Roads, VA

[Bob Richardson]

Greetings,

(For Cloverleaf integrator 5.3 and above):

Another caveat about port numbers within the ephemeral range for Cloverleaf:  the multi-connect protocol uses the values defined at the OS level (at least in AIX unix) in the ephemeral range to assign suballocations to the main port for each client connection made for a Cloverleaf multi-connect server.  As a rule we don’t hard assign any ports in that range for our other TCP connections.  And the point was made about staying away from the hostserver ports in the 13000 – 13500 range too.

Enjoy.

[John Mercogliano]

Richard,

  Good point  This would be true on all OS’s which brings up another protential problem on windows systems using multi port.  With Microsofts low Ephemeral Range of 1024 through 4999 depending on the number of potiential connections you can get and other applications that might also use them you have the potential to run out of Ephemeral ports.

John Mercogliano
Sentara Healthcare
Hampton Roads, VA

[Craig Weldy]

Since I started working on interfaces, 6 years ago, we have used 6000-9999 for our port numbers.  I am looking at reallocating my port numbers so that the number tells as much about the function and system of the thread as the name does.

Ok, So in following this thread I have the following suggestions for what not to use:

    0 – 9999

    13000 – 13500   Cloverleaf

    32768 – 65535    AIX Ephemeral

Does this imply then that the numbers that are safe to use are:

    10000 – 12999    and   13501 – 32767

Or is there something else I need to watch out for?

Craig Weldy
Senior Interface Analyst
Beacon Health System
South Bend, In, 46615

[Michael Hertel]

We’ve been using the following for years without issue until Cloverleaf started using 13xxx.

ABCCD

A = which CL host (1 or 2, (we have 2 boxes))

B = which environment (1-5, (preprod test, preprod qa, prod, postprod training, postprod test))

CC = which source system (01-99, (lab, rad, cis, respther, etc.))

D = which type of data (0-9, (adt, sched, results, etc))

After Cloverleaf started using 13xxx, we decided that we would only use 2xxxx and keep the CL host number the same for both boxes. This is helpful for failover when moving SAN disks from one box to the other.

x3xxx is prod and will only be running on one box.

[Author]

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