renegotiating socket connections

[Nathan Clegg]

I'm writing a server application in python.  I understand that most
servers fork off a process for every incoming connection and then
renegotiate on a different port to free up the well-known server port.  I
would rather do a multithread model than a forked process model because of
shared memory needs.  I've heard that forking the process "automatically"
renegotiates the port somehow, but that doesn't make much sense to me.

More importantly, since I don't want to fork at all, how does one switch
to a different port?  Is this a manual process?  It seems it would be slow
to have so much round-trip communication before even establishing a
connection, and none of my network manuals say anything more than this
sort of thing "happens."  Any tips?


----------------------------------
Nathan Clegg
 nathan at islanddata.com