And then they might code up some sort of service lookup tool thingy to use on the train wreck that is the modern web.

  $ getent services gopher
  gopher               70/tcp

Top reply, and clearly based on the article's title rather than its content, as are the follow-ups. You're making this site worse.

The article is short; go read it then come back and delete.

Perhaps we could even make the file the port itself, perhaps calling it a “socket”? A “unix socket” would be a great name. If we could place all these files behind a local reverse proxy then we could use localhost/jekyll or localhost/fastapi. It’s just a dream

If the port number space was bigger, I wonder if we would have gotten a global naming service (ala DNS) for unique service names.

You can still publish port numbers along with addresses in DNS though (SRV records).

Sure, but they are running web-apps they've vibe-coded (hence the .vibe tld) and for that use-case of many web apps that I run in docker containers I use nginx-proxy [0]. All the container needs is a VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable with the domain and what my router needs is an address entry for the wildcard subdomains. I even have nginx-proxy on a internet-accessible staging server.

[0] https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy

Not modern enough. Unix is too low level, antiquated, and discriminates against those who just want to get shit done instead of reading manpages or documentation by hand.

What about identifying different instances of the same service?

This is exact problem I see with all of those vibe coded software: In few years everything will be super fragmented, everyone will be using their own set of tools, or vibe coding them, themselves. Communication between teams or even between team members will become very hard because of those differences. 'What do you mean production is down? On my vibe coded dashboard everything is green!'

> It's like someone should make a file... maybe in /etc ... and put short names for services in it... maybe it could be called /etc/services...

People shit-talk container orchestration systems like Kubernetes, but if anything they greatly simplified (if not completely eliminated) the need for this sort of network bookkeeping.

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