[geeks] What might cause this...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 28 Apr 2002, alex j avriette wrote:

> Verizon and Comcast both are dropping ssh, http, and ftp traffic to 
                                        ^^^

Weak!  WTF would they want to drop ssh packets?  No Micros~1 worm would be
smart enough to actually use a secure transfer protocol.

Damn, pretty soon the whole concept of "well known ports" is going to
vanish among the end-user crowd.  Hm.  That gives me an idea.

<brainstorm>

What if[1] we had a set of centralized servers with service information
about many hosts, where each host was identified by a globally-unique
symbolic name that mapped to an IP address upon lookup (to account for
dynamic IPs).  That centralized server could do dictionary (hash-table)
lookups against service names, and map them to a port number.

All we'd need then would be a wrapper system, and we could do things like
this:

   sftp me at octane.cablemodem.jonathan.patschke

And I might be running sshd on port 3010 or whatever.  This would sort-of
like be DNS for services.  Actually, implementing these as specially-
formatted TXT records[2] in DNS might be the best idea. Combined with
dyndns it would also solve both problems.  However, due to the way DNS
returns TXT records, it would, at worst, require O(n) time to look up.

I don't need to point out how this might help make systems behind NAT
-far- more accessible, should somebody want that.

</brainstorm>

*puts down the crackpipe*

--Jonathan
[1] Damn, now -I'm- doing it!
[2] foo IN TXT "::unimap:service:ssh:3010"