Manually opening TCP ports

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Mar 07), Siraj Shaikh said:
> I am just wondering if there is a utility (or any feature in FreeBSD)
> that allows me to manually open a TCP port on a machine. I am looking
> for a way that could either allow me to open ALL or many TCP ports on
> a machine.
> 
> Also, is there any way of running a service on more than a single
> port, or on all or many ports?

If you are concerned about managing 65000 listening sockets ports in a
single process, you can write a single ipfw rule to collapse many
incoming ports into a single one, so you only have to open one
listening socket in your program:

ipfw add 1300 fwd 127.0.0.1,7000 tcp from any to me dst-port 7000-8000

The correct answer to your question really depends on why you need to
open so many ports in the first place.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com