Port 1942 sits in the registered port range and carries an official IANA assignment almost nobody knows about.
What It's Registered For
IANA assigned port 1942 — on both TCP and UDP — to res, short for Real Enterprise Service.1 The registrant is Bob Janssen, one of the founders of RES Software, a Dutch company that built IT workspace and automation management tools starting in 1999.
RES Software grew, raised venture capital, expanded across Europe, and was eventually acquired by Ivanti in 2016.2 The port registration remained. It still does.
Whether any current RES or Ivanti product actively uses port 1942 for communication is unclear — the registration predates most modern documentation practices, and the company's product line has evolved substantially since the original assignment.
What Range This Port Belongs To
Port 1942 is a registered port (range: 1024-49151). These ports are:
- Above the well-known ports (0-1023), which require root/admin privileges to bind
- Registered with IANA by applications and services that requested a dedicated number
- Not protected — any process can bind to them without special permissions
Registered ports were meant to give software a stable, predictable home. In practice, many registrations are old, sparse on documentation, or tied to products that have since changed hands or been discontinued. Port 1942 is a textbook example.
Is Anything Using This Port on Your Machine?
To check what, if anything, is listening on port 1942:
On Linux/macOS:
On Windows:
If nothing appears, the port is idle. That's the expected result on most systems — RES/Ivanti products are enterprise IT management tools with a limited install base.
Why Unassigned-Looking Ports Matter
Port 1942 illustrates something worth understanding: the IANA registry is large, aging, and full of entries that look like silence but aren't. A port database that returns "unknown" isn't necessarily saying the port is free — it may just lack the data.
When you see unexpected traffic on a registered-but-obscure port like 1942, the honest question isn't "is this malware?" It's "what software is running here, and does it belong?" Most of the time, the answer is mundane. Occasionally, it isn't.
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