The OpenEdge Hive

This will the summary of my experiences in last couple of years over ports in Progress (and AIX).

Port is important in general. In Progress we use -H and -S(port) to specify a remote database connection. As a better practice, we specify those "conventional" ports in the /etc/services file so they will be reserved. While I use -H and -S in the pf file for the client connection, on the server side, there are more port configurations, the minport and maxport options. They are actually not optional when you have hundreds even over a thousand servers going on in the setup. It is very important to make sure to have a range of unused ports for the server connections. Most likely I won't have any probably starting up the database broker, but as the connections come in, and more servers are getting started, random ports are selected and I might get strange message like "can't start server". Further more, it will make maintenance a lot easier if I use same range of ports for every server.

The same goes for the Webspeed broker, in the broker definition, it is better to specify the range of ports for the agents.

if you ever need to find out the usage for specific port in AIX, other than netstat, I really like "lsof -i:port_number"