[Idle-dev] Serious problems getting idlefork to display on multiple xservers

[Mats Wichmann]

At 02:59 PM 5/9/2002 +0100, Michael Williams wrote:
 >On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 08:59:01AM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
 >> > We need a stop gap solution for next week. idle as it stands will
 >> > probably do the job.
 >>
 >> The problem is indeed that all instances use the same port.  This is
 >> determined by the line
 >>
 >>     default_port = 0x1D1E   # "IDlE"
 >>
 >> in the file protocol.py.  If you could make this initialized from an
 >> environment variable, e.g.
 >>
 >>     default_port = 0x1D1E   # "IDlE"
 >>     p = os.environ.get("PORT")
 >>     if p: default_port = int(p)
 >>
 >> then you can give each student a personalized environment variable.
 >>
 >> That's the best I can think of rigt now.
 >
 >A quick test suggests that works and may be just the temporary solution
 >we are looking for. Thanks very much! Is there a particular range we
 >should use for the PORT variable? Over 1024 for example?

User-chosen ports should be over some number that's around 32k.
There's a chart that shows what the different port ranges
are blocked off for. So the latter range Guido suggests
(50000 to 60000) is a good one.

I'm wondering if, longer-term, this whole scheme is going to
be clean for people who like to use a secure (ssh) tunnel
for their remote displays.  Maybe there's no impact, I'd actually
have to stop and think (gasp).