Port 2200: Unassigned — Borrowed by Many

What Port 2200 Is

Port 2200 belongs to the registered port range (1024–49151). IANA maintains this range and assigns port numbers to specific services on request — but port 2200 was never claimed. It sits unassigned in the registry, which in practice means anyone can use it for anything.

That's not unusual. Thousands of ports in the registered range are unassigned. The Internet runs on far fewer than 49,151 named services.

What Actually Runs Here

Alternate SSH

The most common thing you'll find on port 2200 in the wild is SSH.

Port 22 is SSH's official home, but it's also one of the most-scanned ports on the Internet. Automated bots probe port 22 constantly, trying default credentials and known exploits. Some administrators move their SSH daemon to an alternate port to reduce log noise — and 2200, being easy to remember and close to 22, is a frequent choice.

This is sometimes called "security through obscurity," and the security community is divided on whether it's worth doing. It doesn't make SSH more secure — the bots eventually find alternate ports too. But it can reduce the noise of failed login attempts in your logs, which has some operational value.

If you see port 2200 open on a server you don't recognize, SSH is a reasonable first guess.

ssh -p 2200 user@hostname

Tuxanci Game Server

The other officially documented use is the default UDP port for Tuxanci — a Czech open-source multiplayer action game built in C with SDL. ¹ The game defaulted to UDP port 2200 for its multiplayer server, which is why you'll find it listed in port databases as "Tuxanci Game Server."

It's a real thing, not a fabrication. The source code is on GitHub. Whether anyone is actively running a Tuxanci server right now is a different question.

How to Check What's Listening

If you're troubleshooting why port 2200 is open on your machine:

Linux/macOS:

# See what process is listening on port 2200
sudo ss -tlnp | grep 2200
# or
sudo lsof -i :2200

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2200

The output will show you the process ID. From there you can identify which application owns the port.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The port system exists to create shared expectations. When you connect to port 443, you expect HTTPS. When you connect to port 25, you expect SMTP. That shared expectation is what makes the Internet work without needing to negotiate protocols from scratch every time.

Unassigned ports are where that shared expectation breaks down — intentionally. They're the wilderness between the named settlements. For administrators who want to move a service off its well-known port, or for developers building something new, unassigned ports are available territory.

Port 2200 is just one square in a very large unmapped grid.