What Port 10002 Is
Port 10002 exists in the registered port range (1024–49151), the middle tier of Internet ports. This range is registered with the IANA, meaning vendors can officially claim ports here. Unlike the well-known ports (0–1023) that have canonical services, registered ports are "assigned upon request" — and 10002 has been requested, but never became so widespread that everyone knows what it is.
Known Uses
Port 10002 appears in several contexts:
Cisco Cluster Management — The oldest documented use. Cisco devices used this for cluster control interfaces, though the service is now legacy and unsupported. Some Cisco switches may still listen here. 1
EMC Documentum — EMC has registered interest in port 10002 for their Content Server product, a document management system. If you see 10002 on a server, it might be Documentum checking in. 2
Backup Services — Various backup applications use this port for administrative communication. No single canonical service, but you'll find it in use across different backup solutions. 1
Chef Configuration Management and Apache Hive have also been known to use it, depending on deployment. 2
The Honest Truth About Unassigned Ports
The IANA service registry lists thousands of ports. Most are unassigned. This isn't a problem — it's how the system actually works.
The famous ports (HTTP on 80, HTTPS on 443, SSH on 22) exist because they're so common that firewalls, browsers, and security systems all special-case them. Everything else? Every database, every monitoring tool, every internal service — they run on the registered and ephemeral ranges. Port 10002 is typical, not exceptional.
What matters isn't the port number — it's that something is actually listening. The port number is just a handle. The real protocol, the real security, the real coordination: that's in the application layer, inside the TLS handshake, in the API documentation, in the firewall rules.
How to Check What's Listening on Port 10002
On macOS or Linux:
On Windows:
From a remote machine (use with caution):
These commands will tell you if anything is actually listening. If something is, the harder question — what is it, why is it there, should it be open to the network — that's where the real work begins.
Why This Matters
The Internet's infrastructure doesn't run on famous ports. It runs on thousands of registered, semi-forgotten, vendor-claimed ports exactly like this one. When you scan your network and find something on 10002, you've found something real — a tool, a service, a piece of the system. It might be benign (Documentum doing its job). It might be a backdoor. It might be a forgotten service that should have been removed years ago.
The port system works because it's honest: "We can't name everything globally, so here's a space where you can name your own thing." Port 10002 is the system admitting that complexity.
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