Talk:Portmap

Explain how services other than NFS and NIS use this

It would be nice to have a note in this article explaining how other services besides NFS and NIS request and choose ports. 67.112.123.90 03:12, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The version of this page as of that date says "The portmapper service first appeared in BSD 4.3 and has only been used extensively by NIS, NFS, and FAM so far." That sentence starts out with a false statement - it first appeared in SunOS 2.0, along with the rest of ONC RPC, and BSD picked it up later - and makes a claim about extensive use that's... questionable. Perhaps what was meant was that, at least in BSD, the two most common users of ONC RPC as a whole were NFS, NIS, and FAM at the time.

In any case, the first claim has been corrected and the latter claim is no longer being made.

Except for the port mapper/rpcbind itself, and NFS, almost all ONC RPC services request and choose ports the same way. The server usually gets a port number assigned to it by the OS networking stack, and makes ONC RPC calls to the portmapper to register its program number/version numbers with that port number. Clients who want to use that service make an ONC RPC call to the portmapper to get the port number used for the program number/version number. Guy Harris (talk) 20:14, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Explain in more detail

This would be useful if it was explained what portmap does in more general terms as opposed to "Provides RPC services" 109.231.214.194 (talk) 17:02, 1 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The version of this page as of that date says more than that in sentences afer the first one. Presumably what is meant is that it should explain why those services are necessary (tl;dr: because most ONC RPC services are not assigned a fixed port number). Guy Harris (talk) 20:22, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]