Port 2346: redstorm_join — Where Tom Clancy's Games Found Their Squads

Port 2346 has a name: redstorm_join. It's the game lobby connection port for Red Storm Entertainment's Tom Clancy titles — Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and their sequels. When players in the early 2000s clicked "Join Game," their machines reached out on port 2346.

Red Storm Entertainment was co-founded by Tom Clancy himself in 1996.¹ The studio put its name directly into the port identifier — redstorm_join — a small act of ownership baked into network infrastructure. The games are gone from active servers now, but the name lingers in port databases.

The Registered Port Range

Port 2346 sits in the registered port range: 1024–49151.² This range sits between two others:

• Well-known ports (0–1023) — Reserved for foundational Internet services like HTTP (80), HTTPS (443), SSH (22). These require elevated privileges to bind.
• Registered ports (1024–49151) — Available for applications to register with IANA. No special privileges required to bind. Anyone can request an assignment.
• Dynamic/ephemeral ports (49152–65535) — Used by operating systems for temporary outbound connections. No registration needed or expected.

Registered ports are where applications live: game servers, media streaming protocols, proprietary enterprise software. Some are formally assigned. Many, like port 2346, were used by applications without formal IANA registration, or were registered informally and later abandoned.

What "Unassigned" Actually Means

IANA maintains the official registry of port assignments.³ Port 2346 shows no current registered service. That doesn't mean the port is empty — it means no one has filed paperwork.

Many ports in the registered range were used by applications that never bothered with IANA registration, or were registered decades ago for software that's no longer maintained. The registry is a map, not the territory. The territory is whatever your operating system is actually listening on.

Security Posture

Port 2346 has no active threat associations. The SANS Internet Storm Center shows minimal scanning activity against it.⁴ Historically, some security scanners flagged it due to its status as an informal game port (unrecognized services sometimes trigger alerts), but it carries no documented malware associations.

An unassigned port sitting open on a server is worth investigating — not because port 2346 is dangerous, but because any unexplained open port is a question that deserves an answer.

What's Listening on This Port

To check what process has claimed port 2346 on your machine:

Linux / macOS:

# Show processes listening on port 2346
ss -tlnp sport = :2346

# Or with lsof
lsof -i :2346

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2346

The output will show the process ID (PID). Match that PID to a process name using Task Manager or ps aux | grep <PID>.

If something is listening on 2346 and you don't know why, that's the question to answer.

Related Ports

Red Storm Entertainment used a small block of ports for their multiplayer stack:

These three ports traveled together in router port-forwarding guides for Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six circa 2001–2004.