Dropbox has an IANA port number now | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox has an IANA port number now

iana.org

66 pointsenki23 comments

Pardon my ignorance, but how big of a deal is this? It seems pretty much anyone can make something a "well-known port". My quick check found at least 5 more (non-Dropbox) ports added today.

In any case, I'm sure this can only be good for Dropbox and its users. Congrats to the team!

The big deal being it kind of cements it up there in the household name bracket of the IT world.

Indeed. Right up there with such immortal names as HDAP and Zannet. Not to mention UTMPSD, tn-tl-w1 or DEI-ICDA. Truly, they have broken through to the big time.

Also, from the headers,

    ASSIGNMENT OF A PORT NUMBER DOES NOT IN ANY
    WAY IMPLY ENDORSEMENT OF AN APPLICATION OR PRODUCT

Or my port:

optimanet 2408/tcp OptimaNet optimanet 2408/udp OptimaNet # John Graham-Cumming <jgc&optimal.com>

Is the dropbox protocol specified anywhere?

Edit: My google-fu isn't finding anything.

I'm guessing not at the moment. But, if you are intrepid you could fire up Wireshark and start dropping/sharing/deleting files and see what happens. This actually sounds like fun, however I am otherwise indisposed right now.

No need to do that, their linux client is open source IIRC.

The program that talks to their daemon is open source. The daemon itself is not.

That's why I said their "client".

The client is split into two parts. The "dropboxd" daemon, which talks the server, is proprietary. The "nautilus-dropbox" plugin, which integrates with the GNOME desktop, is under GPL.

The RPC protocol between nautilus-dropbox and dropboxd is documented. But (as far as I know) the network protocol between dropboxd and the server is not.

The daemon is also a client. It talks to their server.

Port 17500 tcp and udp.

So bad nobody will use it. Many enterprise firewalls only allow port 80 today and a bunch of well know applications.

Umm... this doesn't matter. This protocol is only for detecting and copying files that are on computers in your immediate LAN.

Am I the only one that read that as "I am not a port number now"?

Is the Dropbox protocol open and has an RFC? If not I think IANA should revise their practices to only allow registration of ports for protocols that do.

Why is that ? IANA's task is to coordinate the assignment of, among others, port numbers, not to promote free / open software.

Yes, but the post you're replying to is discussing open protocols, not free software or OSS.

OK, but making sure two people don't try to use the same port for different things doesn't have much to do with making sure whatever they're doing is documented.

Surely, you wouldn't want to create a new service that defaults to a port already in common use, but unlisted because the protocol didn't meet someone's definition of open.

Let us know whey they have a client that doesn't bring my workstation to its knees every 1/2 hour.

A CLI client that isn't an unsupported python script. Hello? win32?

Congrats enki!

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