What Port 461 Was Assigned For
Port 461 is officially assigned by IANA to a service called datasurfsrv (DataRampSrv), registered for both TCP and UDP protocols.12 The service was registered by Diane Downie with the contact email downie@jibe.MV.COM—a domain that no longer exists.
That's essentially everything we know with certainty.
The Mystery of DataRampSrv
Port 461 represents something genuinely strange about Internet history: the complete disappearance of a service. Someone built DataRampSrv. Someone thought it was important enough to register an official IANA port number. Someone, somewhere, ran this service and presumably connected to it on port 461.
And then it vanished.
No documentation survives explaining what DataRampSrv actually did. The protocol is not described in any RFC. The service doesn't appear in historical software archives. The company or project behind jibe.MV.COM has left no trace. Even searches for the contact person yield nothing.
All that remains is the port assignment itself—a single line in the IANA registry that says this port belonged to something called DataRampSrv.
The Well-Known Port Range
Port 461 sits in the well-known port range (0-1023), also called system ports. These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services and protocols.3 Getting a port assigned in this range meant submitting documentation to IANA and having your protocol deemed significant enough to deserve a permanent spot in Internet infrastructure.
DataRampSrv earned that designation. Then it disappeared.
What This Port Carries Today
Almost certainly: nothing.
Port 461 is a fossil. The service it was assigned to no longer exists. The contact email bounces. The protocol is lost. Modern systems don't listen on this port by default. If you scan port 461 across the Internet, you'll mostly find it closed.
But the assignment remains in the official registry, unchanged, a monument to something that once mattered to someone.
How to Check What's Listening
If you want to check whether anything is using port 461 on your system:
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If something is listening, it's almost certainly not the original DataRampSrv. It might be a custom application that chose this port precisely because it's assigned but unused—a quiet spot in the port number space.
The Broader Pattern
Port 461 is not unique. The IANA registry contains hundreds of assigned ports for services that no longer exist or were never widely deployed. These are the archaeological layers of the Internet—protocols that seemed important in 1995, services that served a specific need for a specific community, experiments that never scaled.
Some of these services were replaced by better protocols. Some were made obsolete by changing technology. Some simply faded away as their creators moved on to other projects.
DataRampSrv is one of these ghosts. We don't know which category it falls into because we don't know what it was.
Why This Matters
The existence of ports like 461 is a reminder that the Internet you use today is built on layers of history. Every port number in the well-known range represents a decision someone made decades ago. Some of those decisions shaped how the Internet works. Others, like port 461, are footnotes—services that existed, mattered to someone, and then disappeared.
But the port number remains. Because in the architecture of the Internet, once something is assigned, it stays assigned. Port 461 will always be DataRampSrv's port, even though DataRampSrv is gone.
That's the honest truth of port 461: it's a memorial to something we can no longer remember.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was this page helpful?