[BC] Lost in IT land ( HELP !! )

[Rob Landry]

On Sun, 17 Jun 2012, RichardBJohnson at comcast.net wrote:

> Every Unix/Linux system has a file, /etc/services, which contains the 
> "well-known" ports. However, if your system is not on the public network 
> (the Internet), you can use any port number above 1024. Ports are the 
> second part of an address. A service on a specific IP address, like 
> 192.9.200.1, may listen for connections on ports from 1 (zero is 
> reserved) to 65535. This allows an IP address to have multiple services 
> like mail, telnet, etc., all the "services" listed in /etc/services.

Of course, you can use any port on your machine for whatever you wish, as 
long as is doesn't conflict with another service you are running. For 
instance, I run an ssh server on port 443 on one machine, even though port 
443 is officially for secure Web service (https). But I'm not running a 
secure Web server, so I'm free to use port 443 for ssh.

I frequently need to connect to my machine from my laptop. If I happen to 
be behind somebody's firewall, I may find the usual ssh port (22) blocked 
for outgoing traffic, but 443 is usually not blocked.

Rob