Port 2962: iph-policy-cli — a registered port for software that no longer exists

What this port is

Port 2962 is officially registered with IANA as iph-policy-cli — the command-line interface component of a policy management system built by IP Highway, a networking company active in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It is not unassigned. It is something rarer: a registered port for software that no longer ships.

The IP Highway story

IP Highway built policy-based networking (PBN) software — systems that let network administrators define rules for how traffic should be handled, rather than configuring each device individually. This was a serious problem in the late 1990s as enterprise networks grew complicated faster than manual configuration could keep up with.

The company registered two neighboring ports:

The person who filed the registration was Shai Herzog, a co-author of RFC 2748 — the COPS protocol (Common Open Policy Service), a real and lasting contribution to how networks handle policy decisions. Herzog also contributed to IETF's work on requirements for policy management systems, and authored a book titled Understanding Policy-Based Networking.

The work was serious. The company did not survive.

What you'll find on this port today

Nothing, in almost every case. If something is listening on port 2962 on your system, it isn't IP Highway's software — it's either:

• A custom application that chose this port because it looked available
• Misconfigured or mislabeled service
• Something worth investigating

How to check what's listening

On Linux or macOS:

# Show what process is using port 2962
ss -tlnp | grep 2962
# or
lsof -i :2962

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2962

If you get output, the process ID will tell you what application claimed the port. If you get nothing, the port is idle — which is expected.

Why orphaned registrations matter

The registered port range (1024–49151) has tens of thousands of entries. Many of them, like this one, belong to companies and products from the early Internet era that no longer exist. The registrations don't expire automatically — IANA doesn't reclaim them when companies fold.

This creates a practical reality: the registry says a port is "taken," but no software actively uses it. Developers sometimes pick these ports for new applications anyway, assuming (correctly) that they won't conflict with anything real.

Port 2962 sits in this category. Officially claimed. Practically vacant. A small monument to a company that tried to make large networks manageable, and to the people who wrote the RFCs that actually stuck around.