Stupid question ?

[ponder]

Why do gaming servers & the likes not allow you to specify which ports to use ?

I know there are standard ports for different applications but you 'should' still be allowed to change them, especially if you live in darkest africa.

cheers
mips

 

[slimothy]

because its harder to code dynamic networks liek that than it is to have a normal server/client setup and game coders wanna make games and not invent transfer protocols for people in countries that dont buy alot of games anyway.

Thats why proxies are gold to us, because the proxy can be on a good port and relay your data to the bad port on the gaming server

 

[gkm]

A server has to listen on a specific port (or set of ports) for incoming connections. For example, a web server normally listens on port 80 and an FTP server on port 21 etc. One can change a server to listen on a different port, for example change a web server to listen on port 8080. However, then web browsers by default will be unable to connect, until they specify port 8080 in the URL. So, to make it easy for clients to connect, a server (including a game server) needs to use a fixed address known to the server's clients.

Many game servers allow one to change the port it is listening on and one then also must specify the port on each client before connecting. However, this cannot really be done for public servers, since it would be too much hassles to expect everybody to specify a port on the client.