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Port selection

Servers listen for requests arriving on a specified port. A port number identifies the program associated with the end of a network connection. The standard port number for HTTP is 80. Internet standards designate port numbers less than 1024 as reserved ports, and on most multi-user operating systems only privileged processes can be bound to them. On such a system the Web server program may have to be started by a privileged user if it is to use the standard reserved port. Non-privileged users may be able to start their own Web servers, using a non-reserved port such as 8080.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.