Port 134: INGRES-NET — The Database That Taught the World

What Port 134 Does

Port 134 is assigned to INGRES-NET Service¹, the networking component of the Ingres relational database management system. INGRES-NET allowed Ingres utilities and applications to access databases on remote installations, handling cross-platform data format conversion across different computer architectures, operating systems, and network protocols².

In practice, almost no one is running INGRES-NET on port 134 today. The protocol is a relic. But the system it served is one of the most important in computing history.

The Story of Ingres

In 1973, two professors at UC Berkeley, Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, read Edgar Codd's papers on the relational data model and decided to build one³. They originally raised money for a geographic data system (the name Ingres stood for Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System), then redirected the funding toward their real interest: proving that relational databases could actually work.

DARPA turned them down. The Office of Naval Research turned them down. Both were already funding database research elsewhere. Stonebraker eventually pieced together modest grants from the NSF and three military agencies⁴. The resulting system, Berkeley INGRES, became one of the first two complete implementations of the relational model, alongside IBM's System R.

INGRES ran on PDP-11 minicomputers under UNIX. It introduced QUEL, a query language based on tuple relational calculus that many computer scientists considered more mathematically elegant than IBM's SQL⁵. QUEL was more composable, more formally grounded. In a just world, it might have won.

It didn't. SQL became the standard, partly because IBM's marketing reach was enormous, and partly because SQL was easier to learn for people without a background in relational algebra. Ingres spent three years converting from QUEL to SQL (delivered in version 6), and by the time it shipped, Oracle had seized the commercial market⁶.

The Descendants

Here's the thing about losing: sometimes the losers change the world more than the winners.

Students trained on Ingres went on to start or staff nearly every major database company⁷. Robert Epstein, a student on the project, co-founded Sybase. Sybase's codebase became the foundation for Microsoft SQL Server. In the mid-1980s, Stonebraker started a new project called Postgres ("Post-Ingres"), which evolved into PostgreSQL⁸, now one of the most widely used databases on earth.

The commercial side became Relational Technology, Inc. (RTI) in 1980, renamed to Ingres Corporation in the late 1980s, and eventually became Actian Corporation in 2011⁹.

Port 134 was reserved for INGRES-NET, registered to Mike Berrow in the IANA Service Name Registry. It sits there still, a permanent parking spot for a system that taught the world what relational databases could be.

How the Protocol Worked

INGRES-NET's Communications Server (iigcc) was modeled on the top four layers of the OSI networking model². It served as a protocol bridge, connecting clients on one network type to database servers on another. A VMS application could reach a UNIX DBMS over TCP/IP. A Protocol Bridge Server (iigcb) handled cross-network translation.

The design was ambitious for its era: true heterogeneous distributed database access, with the networking layer handling all the ugly details of data format conversion between different architectures.

Security

Port 134 has been flagged by some security databases as historically associated with trojan activity¹⁰, though this is common for many well-known ports with low modern traffic. The real Ingres-related security concern is port 1524 (Ingreslock), which has been widely exploited as a backdoor vector by malware¹¹.

If you see unexpected traffic on port 134, investigate. No mainstream application uses it today.

Checking for Activity on Port 134

macOS/Linux:

# Check if anything is listening on port 134
sudo lsof -i :134

# Check with netstat
netstat -an | grep 134

Windows:

netstat -an | findstr "134"

Port 134 in Context

Port 134 sits in the well-known range (0 through 1023), ports reserved by IANA for system-level services¹². On Unix-like systems, binding to these ports requires superuser privileges. Its neighbors tell a story: port 135 is Microsoft RPC, ports 137 through 139 are NetBIOS. Port 134 predates all of them, a Berkeley research project that got its number before Microsoft networking existed.