What Port 1960 Is
Port 1960 is assigned by IANA to nasmanager — the Merit DAC NASmanager service. DAC stands for Distributed Access Control. The service was used to manage Network Access Servers (NAS), the equipment that handled dial-up connections to the Internet in the 1990s.
You are unlikely to encounter this port in the wild. The software is dormant, the dial-up era it served is over, and the port sits quietly in the registered range as a historical artifact.
The Organization Behind It
Merit Network is a nonprofit that operated NSFnet — the academic backbone of the early Internet — from 1987 to 1995.1 They weren't just a user of Internet infrastructure; they helped build it.
In 1991, Merit issued an RFI (Request for Information) for a system to control dial-in access to NSFnet. Livingston Enterprises responded with a description of what became RADIUS — the authentication protocol still used today for Wi-Fi, VPNs, and remote access worldwide. Merit deployed their first RADIUS-based Network Access Server in 1993.2
The NASmanager software was part of that infrastructure: tooling to manage the servers handling thousands of dial-up connections to the academic Internet. Port 1960 was registered with IANA to support that management traffic.
The Registered Port Range
Port 1960 falls in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services through a formal registration process — but "assigned" doesn't mean "active." It means someone once requested the assignment and IANA recorded it.
Registered ports differ from well-known ports (0–1023) in one important way: no special operating system privileges are required to listen on them. Any application can bind to port 1960 without administrator access.
What You'd Find on Port 1960 Today
Almost certainly nothing related to Merit NASmanager. If port 1960 is open on a machine you're investigating, it's likely:
- A custom application that chose this port arbitrarily
- Development or testing software
- Something worth investigating further
How to Check What's Listening
On Linux/macOS:
On Windows:
From outside the machine:
If you find something listening on port 1960 and it isn't software you recognize, treat it as you would any unexpected open port: investigate before assuming it's benign.
Why Unassigned-in-Practice Ports Matter
The registered port range has 48,128 slots. Many of them, like port 1960, were claimed by software that never reached wide deployment or that served a world that no longer exists. The IANA registry preserves these assignments indefinitely — there's no expiration, no reclamation process.
This matters because it creates ambiguity. A port number with an IANA record isn't automatically safe or expected. The registry describes intent, not reality. What's actually running on any given port is always an empirical question.
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