Port 3094: RapidMQ Registry — A Registered Port with No Living Owner

What Port 3094 Is

Port 3094 is a registered port, officially assigned by IANA to rapidmq-reg — the registry component of Jiiva RapidMQ, a message queuing middleware product for Mac OS X.

The company no longer exists. The software is no longer available. But IANA doesn't reclaim port assignments, so port 3094 sits in the official registry as a permanent memorial to a product that came and went in the early 2000s.

The Story Behind the Registration

In 2001, a Beaverton, Oregon company called Jiiva announced what they claimed was the first message queuing (MQ) middleware built specifically for Apple's Mac OS X. Message queuing lets software running on different machines communicate reliably — sending messages that are guaranteed to arrive, even if the receiving system is temporarily offline.

Enterprise MQ products at the time cost thousands of dollars. Jiiva believed that was wrong, and that Mac developers deserved affordable access to the same kind of infrastructure that Java enterprise shops were building on. They wrote RapidMQ in C, making it usable by both Cocoa and Carbon developers, and registered two ports with IANA to support it:

• Port 3094 — the RapidMQ registry (service discovery)
• Port 3095 — the RapidMQ center (the broker itself)

RapidMQ entered beta, attracted some attention in Mac developer circles, and then faded. The company is gone. The ports remain.¹

The Registered Port Range

Port 3094 lives in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are:

• Assigned by IANA to specific services upon application
• Usable without root or administrator privileges (unlike well-known ports below 1024)
• Not automatically reserved on your machine — any application can bind to an unoccupied registered port

The registered range exists because 1,024 well-known ports aren't enough to serve every protocol and application that needs a stable, documented home. Companies and open-source projects apply to IANA with a service name and description, and IANA assigns them a number. The assignment is permanent.

Unofficial Uses

Port 3094 has no widely observed unofficial uses. It falls within the range (3074–3174) that Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Vegas used over UDP for online play, though that was incidental to the range rather than a specific choice of 3094.²

If you see activity on port 3094 on a modern system, it is almost certainly application-specific — something you or your software configured, not Jiiva RapidMQ.

How to Check What's Using This Port

macOS / Linux:

# Show what process is listening on port 3094
lsof -i :3094

# Or with ss (Linux):
ss -tulpn | grep 3094

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3094

The output will show the process ID. Cross-reference with Task Manager (Windows) or ps aux | grep <PID> (macOS/Linux) to identify the application.

Why Ghost Ports Matter

The Jiiva story illustrates something true about the port registry: it's a historical document as much as a technical one. Every assigned port represents a moment when someone believed their software mattered enough to claim a permanent address on the Internet.

Most users will never encounter port 3094. Most port scanners will flag it as "registered — rapidmq-reg" and move on. But the assignment is there, frozen in 2001, pointing at a vision of Mac OS X as an enterprise middleware platform that never quite arrived.