portmap assigning wrong ports

[Paul Howarth]

Dave Mitchell wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 01:12:49PM +0100, David Jansen wrote:
> 
>>Does anyone know how to tell portmap which ports to give out? I have now
>>noticed a couple of times that some service fails after a reboot, and
>>then it turns out that portmap has assigned a random portmapper to
>>e.g. ypserv and that random number just happens to be the port another
>>service needs. Like this morning:
>>
>>Jan 18 09:35:46 maas dovecot: Fatal: 
>>Jan 18 09:35:46 maas dovecot: listen(993) failed: Address already in use
>>Jan 18 09:35:46 maas dovecot: dovecot startup failed
> 
> 
> Ports just below 1024 are suppoosed to ephemeral - that is to say they are
> a pool of temporary port numbers used by root processes for things like
> the portmapper or rsh. If an application has been hard-coded to use port
> 993, then that application is probably misconfigured.

993 is the standard port for IMAP over SSL. Check your /etc/services file.

Paul.