Portmap

[Niclas Söderlund]

Hi,

what exactly IS portmap? Stripping down a mailserver to its bare minimum and is a little puzzled about the man description. It contemplates "programs" as a term in general and is not very specific for someone not that experienced with the internals of Linux and other OS's.

TIA,

Niclas

PORTMAP(8) BSD System Manager's Manual PORTMAP(8)

NAME
portmap - DARPA port to RPC program number mapper

SYNOPSIS
portmap [-d] [-v]

DESCRIPTION
Portmap is a server that converts RPC program numbers into DARPA protocol port numbers. It must be running in
order to make RPC calls.

When an RPC server is started, it will tell portmap what port number it is listening to, and what RPC program
numbers it is prepared to serve. When a client wishes to make an RPC call to a given program number, it will
first contact portmap on the server machine to determine the port number where RPC packets should be sent.

Portmap must be started before any RPC servers are invoked.

Normally portmap forks and dissociates itself from the terminal like any other daemon. Portmap then logs
errors using syslog(3).

Option available:

-d (debug) prevents portmap from running as a daemon, and causes errors and debugging information to be
printed to the standard error output.

-v (verbose) run portmap in verbose mode.

This portmap version is protected by the tcp_wrapper library. You have to give the clients access to portmap
if they should be allowed to use it. To allow connects from clients of the .bar.com domain you could use the
following line in /etc/hosts.allow:

portmap: .bar.com

You have to use the daemon name portmap for the daemon name (even if the binary has a different name). For the
client names you can only use the keyword ALL or IP addresses (NOT host or domain names).

For further information please have a look at the tcpd(8), hosts_allow(5) and hosts_access(5) manual pages.

SEE ALSO
inetd.conf(5), rpcinfo(8), pmap_set(8), pmap_dump(8), inetd(8) tcpd(8) hosts_access(5) hosts_options(5)

BUGS
If portmap crashes, all servers must be restarted.

HISTORY
The portmap command appeared in 4.3BSD

4.3 Berkeley Distribution March 16, 1991 4.3 Berkeley Distribution

|_|_|_|_| Niclas Söderlund
|_|_|_|_| All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy


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