Port 1844: Unassigned — A registered port with no current tenant

Port 1844 is a registered port — meaning it falls in the range (1024–49151) that IANA manages for services that have formally requested a number. But port 1844 itself has no current official assignment. It's an empty slot.

Historical Associations

Two services have been linked to port 1844, neither of which is meaningfully active today:

DirecPC-DLL was associated with DirecPC, Hughes Network Systems' satellite Internet service launched in 1996 — the first consumer satellite Internet product in the world. DirecPC delivered downloads at up to 400 Kbps through a 21-inch dish at a time when most people were still on 28.8 Kbps modems. The service was renamed Direcway in 2002, then HughesNet in 2006.¹ Whatever component used port 1844 is a relic of late-1990s satellite networking software.

tbroker (Task Broker) was an HP-UX system service — a daemon specific to Hewlett-Packard's proprietary Unix operating system. HP-UX systems running this service may have used port 1844 for inter-process task scheduling.²

Neither association is current. If you're seeing traffic on port 1844, it almost certainly isn't DirecPC or HP-UX tbroker.

What Traffic on Port 1844 Looks Like

SANS Internet Storm Center logs occasional scanning activity on port 1844 — automated probes from various IP ranges, not targeted attacks, just the constant background noise of the Internet.³ No known malware uses this port. No known exploits target it. It's just a number people's scanners sweep past.

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 1844 is in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are:

• Above the well-known ports (0–1023), which require root/administrator privileges to bind
• Below the dynamic/ephemeral ports (49152–65535), which operating systems assign temporarily to client connections
• Available for any application to use, but IANA maintains a registry so services can formally claim a number

A registered port with no current assignment is not unusual. The registered range has tens of thousands of slots, and many sit empty or hold outdated entries.

How to Check What's Using Port 1844 on Your System

If you're seeing port 1844 in your logs or wondering what's listening on your machine:

On Linux/macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 1844
ss -tlnp | grep 1844
# or
lsof -i :1844

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :1844

The PID from netstat can be matched to a process name in Task Manager or with:

tasklist | findstr <PID>

If something is listening on port 1844 on your system, it's almost certainly a custom application, a development server, or misconfiguration — not DirecPC or HP-UX tbroker.