Port 415 is officially assigned to BNet, a network service registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) by Jim Mertz.1 Despite its assignment in the well-known ports range (0-1023), almost nothing is known about what BNet actually was or what it did.
What Is Port 415?
Port 415 is a well-known port assigned to both TCP and UDP protocols for a service called BNet.2 Well-known ports are reserved for system services and protocols that are expected to be widely used across the Internet. They're assigned by IANA and require coordination to prevent conflicts.
But BNet didn't become one of those widely-used protocols. There's no RFC documenting it. No technical specification. No surviving implementation that anyone can find. Just an entry in the registry with a contact name and an email address at Unisys.
The Well-Known Ports Range
Ports 0-1023 are the well-known ports or system ports. They're the prime real estate of the port number space. Getting assigned a port in this range means your protocol was expected to be important enough to warrant reservation at the system level.
This range includes ports like 22 (SSH), 25 (SMTP), 80 (HTTP), and 443 (HTTPS)—the foundational protocols of the Internet. But it also includes dozens of protocols that never achieved widespread adoption, were superseded by better alternatives, or simply faded away as technology moved on.
Port 415 is one of those.
What We Don't Know
We don't know:
- What BNet stood for (possibly "Business Network" or just "B Network")
- What problem it was trying to solve
- When it was registered (likely sometime in the 1990s)
- Whether it was ever actually deployed in production
- Whether any software still listens on this port
The only information that survives is the IANA registry entry: service name "bnet", protocol support for both TCP and UDP, and Jim Mertz as the contact.3
Not Battle.net
Don't confuse port 415's BNet with Battle.net, Blizzard Entertainment's gaming platform. Battle.net (launched in 1996) uses port 6112 for its chat protocol, not port 415.4 The name similarity is just coincidence.
Why This Matters
Port 415 is a reminder that the Internet's infrastructure isn't just the protocols we use every day. It's also the protocols that didn't make it. The experiments that went nowhere. The services that solved problems that turned out not to be problems. The protocols that lost to better alternatives.
Every assigned port number represents someone who thought they were building something important enough to claim a spot in the global registry. Most of them were right. Some of them weren't. Port 415 is one of the ones we'll probably never know about.
Checking Port 415
To see if anything is listening on port 415 on your system:
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If nothing returns, the port is not in use. If something does return, you've found one of the rare cases where port 415 is actually being used for something.
Security Considerations
Port 415 is not a common target for attacks because there's no known widely-deployed service using it. However:
- Any open port is a potential attack surface
- Malware could use obscure ports like 415 for command-and-control traffic precisely because they're unexpected
- Check what's listening on your ports regularly, including the obscure ones
The Archaeology of Ports
The IANA port registry is an archaeological record. It contains the remnants of the Internet's history—the protocols that thrived, the ones that died, and the ones that never really lived at all.
Port 415 is one of the ghosts. Officially assigned. Technically reserved. Practically forgotten.
Someone at Unisys thought BNet mattered enough to register a well-known port. The IANA agreed. And then... nothing. No RFC was written. No widespread adoption happened. The protocol, if it ever existed in a meaningful way, vanished.
What remains is just an entry in a database and a question: What was BNet, and why did no one think to write it down?
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