Here’s What No One Tells You About Port Number
Port Number has always been the important part of the networking industry, and without the port number, we will lose more than 90% power of the Internet.Port number makes the connection between different processes of different server possible with the minimum complexity.
Why there is a confusion?
The real reason why it becomes difficult to understand port number is because humans have the tendency to relate the knowledge with the physical articles to keep them remember, and this is where port number becomes complex although it is a simple concept.
We often relate the port numbers or port to the female connectors on hardware devices, and this is where all the confusion arises.
This part of the port or female connector given in the image is not the network port number that we are talking about.
What really is a port number?
The port number or port in networking devices is not the female connectors we see on the hardware, but it is a logical construct that identifies a specific process or a type of network service.
In other words, To identify a specific process running on a server, we use the port number. Port number is a logical concept, and it has no physical appearance on any servers or machines.
A port number is similar to a roll number provided to every process running inside a machine or server, and this number helps to find the processes when the machine is at some address(IP Address) on the internet.
Ok, but why we use it?
This is an important question that why we use it; and to answer this, let me give you an example:
Suppose, you want a packet of chips from the vending machine, so first thing you will do is go to a particular vending machine that has the particular type of packet of chips that you want, and after it, you will request a packet of chips by providing the particular code to the machine of the packet of chips that you want; and you get the chips from the machine :)
Now, the same happens here too. To access a particular service of any machine you need a code number. This code number is the port number which connects you to different services or process such as HTTP, FTP, telnet and hundreds of more.
So, who assigns the port number to a process?
There is always a confusion on if every process has a port number, then who defines it inside the machine.
The assignment of the port is done at the time of development of the service and many services used by the developers also have the configurations to set the port number manually.
If you are developing a service that will serve requests coming from different machine, you will have to assign a specific port number to it.
Summary
Port number is a concept many do not understand clearly and this is where they begin to doubt about it.
Port number is just a number assigned to the different services of the machine to interact easily similar to roll number assigned to the class students to make many problem simples.
I believe that next time when you read or hear the word port number, there won’t be a doubt again about how this is going to work.
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