Port 2416: rmtserver — A Name in the Registry

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 2416 is a registered port, falling in the 1024–49151 range that IANA manages on behalf of the Internet community.

The port ranges have distinct characters:

• Well-known ports (0–1023): Assigned to foundational protocols — HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, DNS. Requires IANA approval and typically corresponds to a published RFC.
• Registered ports (1024–49151): Anyone can apply to IANA to claim a port for a specific application. The bar is lower. The result is a mixed registry: genuinely useful protocol assignments sitting alongside vague entries that never went anywhere.
• Dynamic/ephemeral ports (49152–65535): Not assigned to services at all. Your operating system uses these for the source side of outbound connections.

Port 2416 lives in that middle range.

What IANA Says

The IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry lists port 2416 as:

• Service name: rmtserver
• Description: RMT Server
• Transport: TCP and UDP
• Assignee: Yvon Marineau ¹

That's it. No RFC. No specification. No pointer to documentation. Just a name, a protocol field, and a contact.

This isn't unusual. Thousands of registered port entries look exactly like this — a company or individual filed a request, IANA recorded it, and the protocol either never shipped, never gained traction, or stayed entirely proprietary and internal.

Is Anyone Actually Using It?

Not in any documented, public-facing way. The name "RMT Server" appears in other contexts — SUSE's Repository Mirroring Tool uses the abbreviation RMT, as does Tableau's Resource Monitoring Tool — but neither of those products is associated with port 2416. Those are coincidental name collisions, not the same thing.

If you see traffic on port 2416 on your network, it isn't a well-known protocol. It's either:

• Proprietary software using this port by convention
• Malware or scanning traffic (port scanners sweep registered ranges looking for open listeners)
• A misconfigured application that ended up on an arbitrary port

How to Check What's Listening

If port 2416 is open on a machine you control, the answer is one command away:

Linux/macOS:

ss -tlnp | grep 2416
# or
lsof -i :2416

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2416

The output will show the process ID. From there, match it to a process name using Task Manager (Windows) or ps aux | grep <PID> (Linux/macOS).

If you didn't put something there, something put itself there. Worth investigating.

Why Ghost Registrations Matter

The registered port range has over 48,000 slots. Many of them look like port 2416 — occupied on paper, empty in practice. This matters for a few reasons.

Security: An attacker can listen on any unblocked port. Port 2416 carries no inherent trust. Seeing it open on a server you didn't configure is a signal worth following.

Firewall defaults: Some administrators write rules based on IANA assignments, assuming a "registered" port means a known service. Port 2416 shows why that assumption fails. "Registered" means claimed, not documented, not safe, not common.

The allocation problem: The registered range seemed vast in 1990. Today, with containerized services, microservice architectures, and dev environments that assign ports somewhat arbitrarily, even 48,000 slots can feel crowded. Ghost registrations like this one hold space that could serve better purposes — but IANA rarely reclaims them.