This is probably an opinion based question which i know is frowned upon on here but here goes anyway. My question is as the title suggests. I can understand why we need an Ephemeral dynamic port on the client as it would be too complex for a process to deal with having to know what each and every thread was requesting what when receiving incoming packets..
I've looked online but can't find an answer to my question..Why can't we instead of static ports at the server side we instead bind protocols to the service. E.g. Http,Https binded to a web server, SMTP to a mail server etc. So instead of the incoming packet being demultiplexed by the dest port such as 80 for a web service, TCP/ip instead filters on the layer 5 header being Http,FTP, SMTP etc and then forwarding it onto that particular service..
I can understand that this maybe an odd question but i like to break things down and see if there were any alternatives before proposing the way it became using static ports..
Thank You for your time :)
perhaps it could pass directly to the web server process if it knew that this was an Http
could you elaborate on what you mean by it? Because the current model, it is L4 and destination port numbers, that is how it knows the segment should be delivered to an HTTP process.