Port 482 sits in the well-known ports range (0-1023), officially assigned by IANA to a protocol called bgs-nsi. The registration lists Jon Saperia (saperia@bgs.com) as the contact, a network engineer who worked at BGS Systems Inc. in the mid-1990s.12
And that's essentially all we know.
The Well-Known Range
Ports 0-1023 are called "well-known ports" because they're reserved for system services and protocols that are—or were intended to be—widely recognized standards. IANA tightly controls this range, and getting a port assigned here meant you were building something you expected to matter.
Port 482 was assigned. But unlike its neighbors (port 443 carries HTTPS, port 22 carries SSH, port 80 carries HTTP), bgs-nsi left almost no trace.
What We Know About bgs-nsi
Jon Saperia worked as a Software Development Manager and Architect at BGS Systems Inc. from 1994 to 1997.2 He had a background in network management standards and authored several RFCs related to SNMP MIBs (Management Information Bases)—the data structures used for managing devices on IP networks.3
The "nsi" in bgs-nsi likely stands for some kind of network service or network system interface. The "bgs" almost certainly refers to BGS Systems. Beyond that, the protocol itself has faded into obscurity. No RFC documents it. No modern software references it. The assignment exists, but the protocol is gone.
Why This Matters
Port 482 represents something genuinely interesting about the Internet's infrastructure: not every registered protocol survives.
In the 1990s, dozens of companies were building proprietary network management systems, routing protocols, and inter-system communication tools. Some became standards. Most didn't. Port assignments were made with optimism—"we're building something that will matter"—but the Internet is littered with these ghosts: officially assigned ports for protocols that never gained traction, were superseded by better solutions, or simply disappeared when the companies that created them moved on.
Port 482 is one of those ghosts. The registration remains because IANA doesn't delete old assignments, but the protocol itself is effectively dead.
What's Actually Using Port 482
Almost certainly nothing. If you scan for port 482 on the modern Internet, you'll find it closed nearly everywhere. Occasionally, a misconfigured service or a piece of legacy software might listen here, but bgs-nsi itself is not running.
If you want to check what's listening on port 482 on your own system:
Linux/Mac:
Windows:
If nothing returns, nothing is listening. That's the expected result.
The Honesty of Unassigned Purpose
Some ports carry the world's encrypted web traffic. Some carry every SSH connection at 3am. Some carry email, DNS queries, database connections—the invisible infrastructure that makes the Internet work.
And some, like port 482, carry nothing but a registration and a name that almost no one remembers.
That's not a failure. It's just honesty. Not every protocol wins. Not every port becomes essential. The registry preserves these assignments as a kind of archaeological record—evidence of what people tried to build, even when those attempts didn't last.
Port 482 is a reminder that the Internet's port system isn't just a list of active services. It's a historical document, full of things that mattered once, or that people hoped would matter, or that simply existed for a moment before fading away.
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