Port 413 sits in the well-known port range (0-1023), officially assigned by IANA to SMSP (Storage Management Services Protocol). The registration lists Murthy Srinivas as the contact. Beyond that, the trail goes cold.
What SMSP Was Supposed To Be
Based on its name, SMSP was intended to provide network-based storage management services - monitoring storage devices, coordinating backups, managing storage arrays across enterprise networks.
This was a real problem. Enterprise storage management needed standardization. But the solution didn't come from port 413.
What Actually Happened
The storage management world standardized on completely different protocols:
- SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) uses ports 5988 (HTTP) and 5989 (HTTPS)1
- iSCSI for block-level storage uses port 3260
- NFS for network file systems uses port 2049
- CIFS/SMB for Windows file sharing uses port 445
By the time these standards emerged and gained adoption, whatever SMSP was meant to be had already been forgotten.
The Well-Known Port Range
Port 413 belongs to the well-known port range (0-1023), historically reserved by IANA for system services and widely-used protocols. Getting a well-known port assignment used to mean something - it implied your protocol was important enough to deserve a permanent, privileged address.
But assignments don't guarantee usage. The well-known range is full of ports assigned to protocols that never gained traction, services that never launched, and good ideas that never found implementations.
The Ghost Protocols
Port 413 is far from alone. The IANA registry contains hundreds of assigned ports with similar stories:
- Official assignment to a named protocol
- A contact person (often untraceable decades later)
- No RFC, no documentation, no implementation
- No evidence the protocol ever ran on any network that mattered
These are the ghosts in the registry - officially claimed addresses in a namespace that was supposed to bring order to the Internet's services.
What's Actually Using Port 413
In practice, port 413 is effectively unassigned. You might find:
- Nothing - The most common case
- Custom internal applications - Organizations sometimes use officially-assigned-but-unused ports for internal tools
- Malware - Abandoned ports occasionally get appropriated by trojans looking for uncommon ports that won't trigger suspicion
The official SMSP assignment is irrelevant to any of these uses.
How To Check What's Listening
If you want to see what (if anything) is using port 413 on your system:
On Linux/Mac:
On Windows:
Using nmap to scan a remote host:
Most likely, you'll find nothing. Port 413 sits silent.
Why This Matters
The existence of ghost protocols like SMSP reveals something important about how Internet standards actually work:
Registration doesn't equal adoption. Having an official port number, a name in the IANA registry, and a contact person doesn't make a protocol real. Protocols become real when people implement them, deploy them, and depend on them.
Standards emerge from practice. The protocols that won in storage management (SMI-S, iSCSI, NFS) didn't win because they had better port numbers. They won because they solved real problems with working code and gained critical mass.
The namespace remembers everything. Port 413 will forever be assigned to SMSP, even though SMSP exists nowhere except in that assignment. The registry is both a directory of active services and an archaeological record of abandoned ideas.
The Unanswered Questions
Who was Murthy Srinivas? What was the actual SMSP protocol supposed to do? Was any code ever written? Did it run anywhere, even once?
The Internet's memory is surprisingly short. Protocols that seemed important enough to warrant official port assignments disappear without leaving traces. No RFC, no mailing list archive, no GitHub repository, no war stories from engineers who tried to implement it.
Port 413 is assigned, but SMSP is gone - if it ever existed at all.
Related Ports
- Port 5988 - SMI-S (HTTP) - What storage management actually standardized on
- Port 5989 - SMI-S (HTTPS) - Secure storage management
- Port 3260 - iSCSI - Block-level storage over IP
- Port 2049 - NFS - Network File System
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