this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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I often see that network settings have a field for logical port. What is this field.referring to?

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[–] a_fancy_kiwi 51 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Imagine you need to go see your doctor. They work in a building with 65535 rooms. Some rooms are empty. Some rooms have people in them that provide different services. But you need your doctor so you look up their location.

You learn the building address (IP address) and the room number (port)

In practice, you attach services to specific ports so that other computers can access those services. Typically, http traffic is on port 80 and https is on port 443. So if you visit a website, you are likely connected to a server on one of those two ports. But it’s not a requirement. You could create a website and put it on port 2097, or 532, or 47210; it doesn’t matter.

[–] sebinspace 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And the best port of all, 25565

[–] 2dollarsim 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Haha knew that one sounded familiar but it's been a while

[–] Dran_Arcana 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)
[–] Ignisnex 8 points 2 years ago

It's the port for a Minecraft Java server.

[–] RGB3x3 6 points 2 years ago

It's for Minecraft, haha

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

This is such a great analogy

[–] TheBeege 1 points 2 years ago

I came up with the same analogy! This one is great. People understand it really quickly