I linked to the plain text version instead of the PostScript one since my PS viewer – and others might run into the same problem – was unable to recognize the file as PostScript, because the first line was blank. The Google Docs Viewer renders the paper correctly.

In BSD Now 206 a viewer wrote in that @tedu’s previously mentioned article bind broker reminded him of the earlier BSD portals.

The idea behind @tedu’s bind broker is to manage IP addresses and ports between multiple unprivileged users by mapping them to Unix domain socket in the file system. The idea behind portals is to allow programs which aren’t aware of networking themselves to access sockets by presenting them as regular files in a special file system. So instead of having to use a specialized program like nc to access sockets (nc shairosenfeld.com 17 < /dev/null) one could use any program which is able to work with regular files like awk, grep or sed on that file system (cat /p/tcp/shairosenfeld.com/17).

OpenBSD removed portals in 2011 due to lack of maintenance, FreeBSD removed them in 2013 together with all other non-MPSAFE file systems and DragonFly BSD removed them in 2017. In NetBSD however they are still present after being converted to puffs.