Port 2077: Unassigned — The Port That Software Claimed Anyway

Port 2077 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151) with no official IANA service assignment. That doesn't mean nothing runs on it.

The Registered Port Range

Ports 1024 through 49151 are registered ports — the middle ground between the privileged well-known ports (0–1023) and the ephemeral ports (49152–65535) your OS grabs for outgoing connections.

Registered ports are supposed to be claimed through IANA, the organization that keeps the global list. Software vendors submit a service name, a protocol, and a description. IANA assigns the port. The list stays canonical.

Port 2077 skipped that process. IANA shows it as unassigned.¹ But several pieces of software use it regardless, treating the gap as available space.

What Actually Runs on Port 2077

cPanel Web Disk (WebDAV)

The most widely observed use: cPanel's Web Disk service (cpdavd) listens on port 2077 for unencrypted WebDAV connections.² Port 2078 handles the SSL-encrypted variant.

WebDAV lets you mount your web hosting account as a drive on your local machine — drag files in, drag files out, as if the remote server were an external hard drive. If you've ever seen a hosting provider tell you to connect to http://yourserver.com:2077, this is why.

Kaspersky Security Center

Kaspersky's administration infrastructure uses port 2077 for communication between the Administration Kit and Security Center components.³ This is internal management traffic, not user-facing.

IRLP (Internet Radio Linking Project)

The Internet Radio Linking Project uses the UDP port range 2074–2093 for amateur radio Internet bridging.⁴ Port 2077 falls inside that window.

Historical: Tivoli Storage Manager

Older documentation references port 2077 for IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager agent (tsrmagt). This is largely historical — modern IBM Spectrum Protect installations use different ports.

How to Check What's Listening

# Linux/macOS — show what process owns port 2077
sudo ss -tlnp | grep 2077
sudo lsof -i :2077

# Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :2077

If something is listening, the output will tell you which process. If nothing responds, the port is idle on that machine.

Why Unassigned Ports Exist

IANA's list has gaps. Vendors sometimes pick ports without registering them. Products get deprecated, leaving their old ports orphaned. Standards evolve faster than paperwork.

An unassigned port isn't empty — it's just undocumented at the registry level. When you see port 2077 open on a server, check what's actually running there. The number alone won't tell you.