Currently, we are using ports in the low range when the VSMServer is pinging agents to check whether they are alive or not. This isn't really necessary since the ping api isn't passing anything other than a generic response back to the VSMServer. See bug 3876 about why running out of low port numbers is bad. We should therefore look at if we can demote the ping-api to use regular port numbers.
One thing that we discussed was that we don't want to implicitly, accidentally lower our level of security by demoting the ping-api. This is an important point that needs to be evaluated and motivated.