creating a python socket, or if an unused port needs to be provided in a constructor or passed to an external program (i.e. the -accept argument to openssl's s_server mode). Always prefer bind_port() over find_unused_port() where possible. Hard coded ports should *NEVER* be used. As soon as a server socket is bound to a hard coded port, the ability to run multiple instances of the test simultaneously on the same host is compromised, which makes the test a ticking time bomb in a buildbot environment. On Unix buildbots, this may simply manifest as a failed test, which can be recovered from without intervention in most cases, but on Windows, the entire python process can completely and utterly wedge, requiring someone to log in to the buildbot and manually kill the affected process. (This is easy to reproduce on Windows, unfortunately, and can be traced to the SO_REUSEADDR socket option having different semantics on Windows versus Unix/Linux. On Unix, you can't have two AF_INET SOCK_STREAM sockets bind, listen and then accept connections on identical host/ports. An EADDRINUSE OSError will be raised at some point (depending on the platform and the order bind and listen were called on each socket). However, on Windows, if SO_REUSEADDR is set on the sockets, no EADDRINUSE will ever be raised when attempting to bind two identical host/ports. When accept() is called on each socket, the second caller's process will steal the port from the first caller, leaving them both in an awkwardly wedged state where they'll no longer respond to any signals or graceful kills, and must be forcibly killed via OpenProcess()/TerminateProcess(). The solution on Windows is to use the SO_EXCLUSIVEADDRUSE socket option instead of SO_REUSEADDR, which effectively affords the same semantics as SO_REUSEADDR on Unix. Given the propensity of Unix developers in the Open Source world compared to Windows ones, this is a common mistake. A quick look over OpenSSL's 0.9.8g source shows that they use SO_REUSEADDR when openssl.exe is called with the 's_server' option, for example. See http://bugs.python.org/issue2550 for more info. The following site also has a very thorough description about the implications of both REUSEADDR and EXCLUSIVEADDRUSE on Windows: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms740621(VS.85).aspx) XXX: although this approach is a vast improvement on previous attempts to elicit unused ports, it rests heavily on the assumption that the ephemeral port returned to us by the OS won't immediately be dished back out to some other process when we close and delete our temporary socket but before our calling code has a chance to bind the returned port. We can deal with this issue if/when we come across it. )