1

You may be familiar with many well-known TCP ports, such as port 20 for FTP, or 443 for HTTPS. What is TCP Port 1 reserved for?

  • Transmission of digitized food
  • Ping
  • TCPMUX (TCP Port Multiplexer)
  • UDP Translation to TCP
  • I’m not sure, but I’m excited to learn more!

Correct Answer: TCPMUX (TCP Port Multiplexer)

Explanation

Though rarely used (potentially due to the security issues it presents,) TCP Port 1 is reserved for the TCP Port Service Multiplexer.

TCPMUX and its use case was laid out in RFC 1078, however, it has been largely considered deprecated since RFC 7805 in 2016.

Further Reading

Visit the Daily Challenge category and discuss previous questions.

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2

FTP is usually associated to TCP port 21, though TCP port 20 is also associated with FTP.

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3

I was down to two choices. I chose … poorly.

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4

Agreed

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5

Learning

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6

Ditto.

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7

Same here

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8

I just went with the digitized food because I love the idea of being able to email someone a cake for their birthday or something. We’re going to have food printers someday, right?

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9

We’ve already got Chocolate 3d printers! One example I’ve seen used: https://cocoapress.com/

I’ve also seen folks build 3d printers that use pancake mix too, and can add dyes to get different colors. It’s not quite a general-purpose food printer, but maybe one day!

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10

well afaik the only digitised food we get through email at the moment sadly is too much spam… first order of the day, to get bacon!

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11

Port 21 is used by the client to establish a connection to a server. The client uses this port to issue commands, and the server uses this port to return output from the command. When the client issues a (M)PUT or (M)GET command, the command is sent over port 21, but the data is transferred over port 20. A status message is returned by the server to the client on port 21. Port 20 is ONLY for data. Everything else runs on port 21.

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12

My brain still defaults to 22 when asked what port is used for FTP, because I almost never actually use FTP by itself :joy:

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13

Port 22 is for secure login/transfer, such as SSH and SFTP. Old, unsecure FTP is 21 (commands) and 20 (data).

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14

I think we need replicators!

3a5u9y-2757648688

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15

Please be Sci-Fi series specific with your requests:

image

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16

I went with the only one that made any sense. Ping is part of a completely separate protocol stack (ICMP). Translating UDP to TCP wouldn’t be possible because you need to establish a connection using the famous 3-part handshake for TCP (and UDP is connectionless). That only left the digitized food option and TCPMUX. As much as I would like them to have reserved port 1 for digitized food (and you know it would have to be TCP because you don’t want your digital bacon packets to fail to deliver to you,) something like that seemed more fitting for an April 1 RFC and not a legitimate port reservation.

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17

Ha ha… very true. Replicators can be many different things.

So, who would win:

Cylons
Borg
Replicators (Stargate)
Or… some other fictional tech race that I am not thinking of offhand?

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18

Need to throw in the Daleks and Cybermen for good measure.

However, the Borg would probably assimilate all of them … even the purity-rabid Daleks. Although, the Cybermen’s cybermites may put up a decent fight against them.

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19

Dang, I was certain it was for the Emergency Bacon Notification Message Protocol…

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20

I think both the Borg and the Replicators (from Stargate) would defeat the Cylons easily …
Adding the Kaylon (from The Orville) to the mix could be interesting … but I’m still inclined to think it would come down to the Borg and the Replicators (from Stargate).

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