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Port and Glasses

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-12-14 06:24:29 - Graham Ellis

I don't expect you've seen my picture with TCP port numbers coming out of my head very often, have you? In fact this may be the first picture of me in glasses that I've published here. That's not a vanity thing - just that it's only been over the course of this year that I've had to join the majority of people of my age and start wearing the things.

What are the port numbers all about? It's a characteristic of Tomcat that it can be set up to accept connections on a number of different ports, and in a number of different protocols, all at the same time - and this is something that we do on the Apache Tomcat Course that we run every couple of months. Last week, I set up ...
• Port 5008 as the shutdown port
• Port 5050 as my regular http connector
• Port 5009 for ajp connections (mod_jk or mod_proxy_ajp accessors)
• Port 5052 for proxies httpd connections (mod_proxy_http)
... and that's fairly typical. Even though our clients are often interested in having their Tomcatted websites accessible via https (secure protocol), such traffic is probably going to be fronted via Apache http. After all, if an organisation is going to start using the secure https protocol between two servers sitting in the same rack, or even on the same box (usually how they are run!), they either don't fully understand what they're doing, or they are paranoid!