Grant Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > In the nomenclature of some of these applications, that kind > > of transfer is called a client to client connection. Both > > ends are called clients. > > IIRC, we were talking about TCP sockets.
Yes, but if the person was talking about using TCPs sockets in a chat application, they may have been using chat terminology rather than TCP terminology. In a typical chat app, a zillion clients all talk through TCP to a central server, which is like a phone switch. That lets Alice connect to the server and immediately see if Bob is online and what Bob's (possibly dynamic) IP address is. If Alice wants to send Bob a file, she opens a TCP connection directly to Bob. That's called a client to client connection because Alice and Bob are both clients. So, there's a reasonable application for wanting to open a listener port without binding any specific port number. Alice would just ask her OS to assign her a port (say it assigns 23789) and listen on it, instead of having to contend with other apps on the same IP for some specific port number. Then she'd send a message through the chat server asking Bob to connect to port 23789 on her machine. I'm not sure if there's a way to do this. Do you happen to know? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
