Port 2924: PRECISE-VIP — Registered, but Gone

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 2924 sits in the registered ports range: 1024 through 49151. This range is managed by IANA, the organization that acts as the librarian of the Internet's port numbers. Unlike the well-known ports (0–1023), which require special OS privileges to open and carry the Internet's core protocols, registered ports are available to any application that asks IANA to reserve one.

The theory: a company or developer submits a request, IANA assigns them a port number, and that port becomes officially associated with their service. The reality: many of these registrations are decades old, the products have vanished, and the names live on as ghost entries in a text file.

What IANA Says About Port 2924

According to the IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry, port 2924 is assigned on both TCP and UDP to a service called precise-vip (PRECISE-VIP), registered by a Michael Landwehr.¹

That is essentially everything publicly known about it.

There is no RFC. No Wikipedia entry. No vendor documentation. No GitHub repository. No forum thread where someone asks "why is precise-vip running on my server?" The name suggests something related to virtual IP addressing or high-availability networking — "VIP" commonly refers to Virtual IP in load balancing and cluster contexts — but no product with this name appears to exist in any traceable form.

This happens. Companies register port numbers during product development and then the product ships under a different name, gets cancelled, or quietly disappears. The IANA entry outlives everything else.

What Might Actually Be on Port 2924

Since PRECISE-VIP has no known deployment, any process you find on port 2924 is using it incidentally or opportunistically. Common legitimate scenarios:

• Development servers — Developers often pick arbitrary high-numbered ports for local testing. Port 2924 is as good as any.
• Internal tooling — Private applications that simply needed a port and grabbed one.
• Dynamic ephemeral assignment — Operating systems can use registered ports as outbound ephemeral ports for client connections, though 2924 sits below the typical ephemeral range (49152–65535 on most systems).

How to Check What's Listening on Port 2924

If you see activity on this port and want to know what's causing it:

On Linux or macOS:

sudo ss -tlnp | grep :2924
# or
sudo lsof -i :2924

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2924
# Then look up the PID:
Get-Process -Id <PID>

These commands show you the process name and ID bound to the port, which is more useful than any registry entry.

Why Ports Like This Exist

The registered ports range has over 48,000 slots. Thousands of them are in exactly this state: technically claimed, practically abandoned. It's not a flaw in the system — IANA's job is to prevent collisions, not to audit whether every registration still has a living product behind it.

The practical implication: when you encounter an unfamiliar port in this range, the registry is a starting point, not an answer. What actually matters is what your ss or lsof command tells you is running on it right now.