Port 708 is officially unassigned by IANA, but it has a specific history: it was used by NetInfo, a proprietary directory service that shipped with Mac OS X from version 10.0 (2000) through 10.4 Tiger (2005).
NetInfo is gone now. Completely. If you're running any version of macOS from the last 19 years, this port does nothing.
What NetInfo Was
NetInfo was a distributed network database that stored system configuration—user accounts, groups, printer settings, network filesystem mounts. Think of it as the central nervous system for Mac networks in the early 2000s.1
It wasn't new when Mac OS X launched. NetInfo came from NeXTSTEP 0.9 in the late 1980s, where it replaced both Unix configuration files and Sun's Network Information Service (Yellow Pages).2 When Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and built Mac OS X on top of NeXTSTEP, NetInfo came along for the ride.
Port 708 was one of several ports (600-1023) used by Mac OS X RPC-based services, with NetInfo being the most prominent user of this specific port.3
How It Worked
NetInfo stored network-wide configuration in a hierarchical binary database. Multiple NetInfo servers could form a domain hierarchy, allowing a Mac to inherit configuration from parent domains while maintaining local overrides.
The system used RPC (Remote Procedure Call) to communicate between NetInfo clients and servers. Port 708 carried this traffic—queries for user authentication, lookups for printer locations, requests for mounted volumes.
Why It Died
The rest of the world standardized on LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) for directory services. NetInfo was proprietary—it only worked with Macs. It couldn't talk to Windows networks running Active Directory. It couldn't integrate with Linux systems using OpenLDAP.
Apple introduced Open Directory in Mac OS X Server 10.2 (2002) as a standards-based alternative that could speak LDAP, Kerberos, and play nicely with other operating systems.4 For four years, both systems coexisted.
Then came Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) in 2007. NetInfo was completely removed. Local account information moved from NetInfo's binary database to standard property list files in /var/db/dslocal/. Network directory services spoke LDAP. Port 708 went silent.5
What This Port Represents
Port 708 is a fossil. It represents the moment Apple inherited NeXT's technical decisions and spent years unwinding them in favor of industry standards.
NetInfo worked fine. It was functional, even elegant in its way. But proprietary protocols don't survive when the rest of the world picks something else. Apple—a company not known for following others—admitted defeat and moved to LDAP.
If you see port 708 open on a modern system, something is wrong. No current macOS version uses it. No other operating system ever did.
Checking for Port 708
To see if anything is listening on port 708:
On any Mac running 10.5 or later (everything since 2007), you should see nothing.
Why Unassigned Ports Matter
Port 708 sits in the well-known ports range (0-1023), managed by IANA. These ports are supposed to be assigned to specific services so the entire Internet knows what protocol speaks on which port.
IANA never officially assigned port 708 to NetInfo. Apple just used it anyway, the same way they used dozens of other ports in the 600-1023 range for proprietary RPC services. This worked fine within Mac networks but created confusion when trying to integrate with other systems.
Unassigned ports in the well-known range are rare. Most have been claimed for decades. The few that remain unassigned represent either gaps in the original registry or services that died before anyone formalized them.
Port 708 is the latter—a service that existed, served a purpose, and vanished before anyone bothered to make it official.
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