Port 3032: Redwood Chat — A Registered Ghost

What This Port Is

Port 3032 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). IANA's Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry lists it as redwood-chat, assigned to Redwood Chat, with a contact at daou.co.kr — Daou Technology, a South Korean software company.¹

That is nearly the entirety of the public record.

Redwood Chat appears to have been a chat application that no longer exists in any meaningful public form. The port registration outlived the service that requested it — a common fate in a registry that doesn't expire old entries.

What "Registered" Actually Means Here

The registered ports range exists for services that apply to IANA for a stable port assignment. The process requires a contact name, a service description, and a reason. IANA doesn't verify that the service is still active, widely deployed, or even functional. Once registered, entries persist indefinitely.

So port 3032 is "registered" in the technical sense: someone filled out the paperwork, IANA accepted it, and the entry remains. But registration is not the same as relevance.

Is Anything Actually Using This Port?

In practice, port 3032 is open territory. Without an active, widely deployed service claiming it, applications freely use it for internal tooling, development servers, and custom protocols. If you see traffic on port 3032, it almost certainly isn't Redwood Chat.

How to Check What's Listening on This Port

On Linux or macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 3032
ss -tlnp | grep 3032

# Or with lsof
lsof -i :3032

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3032

Then match the process ID (PID) to a running process:

tasklist | findstr <PID>

Why This Port Matters

Port 3032 is a small illustration of how the registry works — and how it ages. IANA assigns ports for the lifetime of the Internet, not the lifetime of the company that requested them. Every obscure registration from the 1990s and early 2000s is still technically "claimed."

That's not a flaw. The alternative — reclaiming ports from defunct services — creates the risk that old software or network equipment still expecting that service starts talking to something completely different. Stale reservations are a form of stability.

So port 3032 stays assigned to Redwood Chat, even though Redwood Chat is gone. The registry keeps its promises, even to ghosts.