Port 2092: Unassigned — Claimed by a 1999 Space Shooter

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 2092 is a registered port — in the range 1024 to 49151 that IANA manages on behalf of the Internet community. These ports are officially reservable: a vendor or standards body can submit an application, and IANA will assign the port to their service and list it in the Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry.

Port 2092 was never claimed. IANA lists it as unassigned. That means no one filed the paperwork, paid the fee, and said "this port is ours."

But ports don't wait for paperwork.

Descent 3: The Unofficial Tenant

In 1999, Outrage Entertainment shipped Descent 3 — the conclusion to a zero-gravity shooter series where you pilot a spacecraft through mining tunnels and fight robot enemies. The game needed a port for multiplayer. The developers chose UDP 2092 as the default.

# Run a Descent 3 dedicated server on the default port
d3.exe -dedicated -useport 2092

The game never registered the port with IANA. It just used it. And because the player community documented it, firewall guides referenced it, and server operators configured it, port 2092 became "the Descent 3 port" in practice regardless of any official record.

Outrage Entertainment folded. Interplay, the publisher, went bankrupt in 2004. But the community kept playing — and in 2024, the source code was released under an open-source license.¹ Active multiplayer servers still run on UDP 2092 today. The port outlasted every corporate entity involved in the game's creation.

IRLP: The Other Resident

The Internet Radio Linking Project (IRLP) uses a range of UDP ports — 2074 through 2093 — to carry amateur radio audio over the Internet, connecting distant radio repeaters into a single linked network. Port 2092 falls inside that range.²

IRLP lets a ham radio operator in Vancouver key up a repeater in Melbourne. The audio travels as VoIP-style UDP packets through this port range. IRLP is widely used in the amateur radio community and has been active since 2000.

Two unofficial uses, neither registered, both legitimate.

What Might Be Listening on This Port

If you see activity on port 2092 on a machine you administer and it's not running Descent 3 servers or IRLP node software, it warrants a look.

On Linux or macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 2092
sudo ss -tulnp | grep 2092

# Or with lsof
sudo lsof -i :2092

On Windows:

# Show process bound to port 2092
netstat -ano | findstr :2092

# Then look up the PID
tasklist | findstr <PID>

If nothing shows up: nothing is listening. The port is dormant. That's the normal state for an unassigned port.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The registered port range has 48,128 slots. Only a fraction are officially assigned. The rest exist in a kind of commons — available for any application to use without permission, claimed through practice rather than paperwork.

This is mostly fine. Most well-behaved software picks a port, documents it, and moves on. The informal record — SpeedGuide, PCGamingWiki, community forums — fills in what IANA doesn't.

The risk is collision: two applications independently choosing the same unassigned port and interfering with each other. Port 2092 has two unofficial tenants that largely avoid this because Descent 3 uses UDP for game state and IRLP uses UDP for audio — and in practice, you're unlikely to run both on the same machine.