What This Port Is
Port 1760 sits in the registered port range (1024-49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services, but unlike the well-known ports (0-1023), no special operating system privileges are required to use them.
Unlike most ports in this guide, port 1760 does have an official IANA assignment. The service name is www-ldap-gw — a web-to-LDAP gateway protocol, registered to Nick Emery at what appears to have been Digital Equipment Corporation (the contact email domain is altavista.digital.com).
What "www-ldap-gw" Was Supposed to Be
The name tells the story: a gateway between the web and LDAP.
LDAP — the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol — runs on port 389 and is how networked systems look up users, email addresses, and other directory entries. In the mid-1990s, when the web was new and directory services were still figuring out how to coexist with it, several teams built gateway protocols that would let a web client query an LDAP directory without speaking LDAP directly. The idea was reasonable. The gateway would sit in the middle, translating HTTP requests into LDAP queries and returning results.
Port 1760 was registered for one such gateway — associated with AltaVista and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which at the time was running one of the earliest major web search engines and had deep expertise in directory services. The altavista.digital.com domain puts the registration squarely in the era before Compaq acquired DEC in 1998 and before Google made AltaVista irrelevant.
The protocol never shipped publicly, or if it did, it left no trace. The IANA assignment remains. The contact email bounces. The company is gone.
What's Actually on Port 1760 Today
Almost certainly nothing related to www-ldap-gw. The protocol never achieved adoption, and the port sits effectively unclaimed in practice.
If you see port 1760 in use on a system you control, it's almost certainly a custom application, a development server, or software that picked this number because it was available. That's normal behavior in the registered port range — plenty of software uses ports without filing paperwork with IANA.
How to Check What's Listening
On Linux/macOS:
On Windows:
The process ID returned will tell you exactly what software claimed the port.
Why Unassigned-in-Practice Ports Matter
The gap between "IANA-assigned" and "actually used" is larger than most people expect. The registered port range has over 48,000 slots, and many of them look exactly like port 1760 — technically owned, practically empty, relics of protocols that were registered but never deployed.
This matters for two reasons. First, when you're picking a port for a new service, it's worth checking IANA even when a port appears free — you might be colliding with a dormant assignment. Second, if you see traffic on one of these ports, you shouldn't assume it's the registered service. The registered service may never have existed in the wild.
Port 1760 is a small memorial to the 1990s Internet: ambitious, eclectic, full of gateway protocols trying to bridge incompatible worlds, most of which quietly disappeared when the web grew powerful enough to absorb them directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
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