Port 1575: Oracle Names — The ghost in the registry

Port 1575 is officially registered to Oracle Names (ORACLENAMES), a centralized database naming service that Oracle Corporation deprecated in Oracle 9i (2001) and completely removed by Oracle Database 10g (2003).¹²

The port remains in IANA's registry. The service it was designed for does not.

What Oracle Names Was

In the 1990s, Oracle faced a problem: enterprises running hundreds of Oracle databases needed a way for clients to find and connect to the right database. The initial solution was tnsnames.ora—a configuration file on every client machine that mapped service names to network addresses.³

But maintaining identical copies of tnsnames.ora across thousands of workstations was administrative hell. Change one database's IP address, and you'd need to update files on every client.

Oracle Names solved this by centralizing the naming service. Instead of each client having its own tnsnames.ora, they would query an Oracle Names server listening on port 1575. The server would resolve the database service name to a network address—one source of truth instead of thousands of copies.⁴

The protocol address looked like this:

(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=namesrvr)(PORT=1575))

Why Oracle Killed It

Oracle Names was supposed to simplify network management. In practice, it created new problems:

• Complex to configure — Setting up Oracle Names servers required understanding distributed naming hierarchies and replication
• Single point of failure — If the Names server went down, clients couldn't resolve database addresses
• Performance bottleneck — Every connection required a naming lookup, adding latency
• Non-standard — While LDAP directory services were becoming the industry standard, Oracle Names was proprietary²

By 2001, Oracle deprecated the service in favor of Oracle Internet Directory with LDAP directory naming. By Oracle Database 10g (2003), the Oracle Names Control Utility was completely removed.¹

Oracle recommended migration to either simple tnsnames.ora files or proper LDAP directory services—solutions that were either simpler or more standards-compliant than the middle ground Oracle Names tried to occupy.

What Runs on Port 1575 Today

Nothing, in most environments. Oracle Names has been unsupported for over twenty years.

However, you might encounter port 1575 in a few scenarios:

• Legacy Oracle installations — Very old Oracle environments (pre-10g) that were never upgraded might still run Oracle Names
• Malware — Like many registered ports, 1575 has been observed in use by trojans and backdoors exploiting the fact that most administrators no longer monitor it⁵
• Unofficial services — Applications sometimes squat on registered but unused ports

Security Considerations

Because Oracle Names is obsolete, any traffic on port 1575 should be considered suspicious in modern environments. If you see listening services on this port:

1. Identify what's actually running: sudo lsof -i :1575 (Unix/Linux) or netstat -ano | findstr :1575 (Windows)
2. Investigate whether it's legitimate legacy Oracle infrastructure or something else
3. If it's truly Oracle Names, consider migrating—running unsupported software from 2001 is a security risk

The official assignment to Oracle protects the port from being reassigned to something else, but it doesn't mean Oracle is actually using it anymore.

The Registry's Memory

Port 1575 belongs to the registered ports range (1024-49151)—ports assigned by IANA to specific services upon request. When Oracle registered this port in the 1990s, Oracle Names was a real product solving a real problem.

The fact that the port remains assigned two decades after the service died shows how permanent IANA's port assignments are. Ports are rarely deallocated, even when the protocols they were assigned to become obsolete.

This is how the Internet's port registry becomes a kind of archaeological record—layers of old protocols, deprecated services, and abandoned standards, each leaving behind a number that once meant something.

Port 1575 is Oracle's abandoned house, still listed in the directory even though no one's lived there since 2001.