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Adapting Plan 9's listen to GNU Guix

Here is a comprehensive adaptation of Plan 9's elegant network service management design to the Linux environment, focusing on the Guix System distribution. The proposed listen utility initiates network services by executing files named after the protocol and port they serve.

– 9fans Thread” 2024), Plan 9 relies, for the following protocols (as well as a few others), on servers reading and writing on the standard streams: ftp, (ssh), telnet, smtp, http, pop, imap, samba, rlogin, lp, 9P (of course). After emailing the kernel developers themselves we got confirmation that what we wanted to achieve: use a setcap binary to grant listen the ability to bind to privileged ports from within a Linux user namespace, was impossible. Port number themselves stem from TCP emerging from earlier protocols (see the early RFCs 322, 349, 433 and those that obsolete them), and a clean design would probably elect to eschew them, leveraging a \(2^{128}\) address space to allow process-to-process communication, instead of the route-to-host, then route-to-process dance we do know.

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