renegotiating socket connections

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

Nathan Clegg writes:
>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

Where does this bit of incorrect conventional wisdom come from?
netstat on my machine is currently reporting:

amarok.80            amarok.40531         32768      0 32768      0 ESTABLISHED
amarok.80            amarok.40532         32768      0 32768      0 TIME_WAIT
amarok.80            amarok.40534         32768      0 32768      0 ESTABLISHED
amarok.80            amarok.40535         32768      0 32768      0 ESTABLISHED

Several connections to port 80, and everything's fine.  Now, you might 
have an architecture where a single gatekeeper process hands things
off to another process, and therefore open a new socket to this
second process, but for a simple forking server, I don't see why 
this port renegotiation would be required.  (Even in this case, you
could use file descriptor passing to avoid the second open, though I
don't know if you can pass file descriptors from Python code easily.)

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/
My nose shall never be touched while heaven give me strength.
    -- Sterne, _Tristram Shandy_