Port 484 sits in the well-known port range (0-1023), officially assigned by IANA to a service called integra-sme—the Integra Software Management Environment. Both TCP and UDP variants are registered to Randall Dow for this network management tool.
But if you scan a thousand networks today, you'll probably never see it in use.
What Are Well-Known Ports?
The Internet's port numbering system divides 65,535 possible ports into three ranges1:
- System Ports (0-1023): The well-known ports, assigned by IANA through IETF Review or IESG Approval
- User Ports (1024-49151): Registered ports for specific services
- Dynamic Ports (49152-65535): Ephemeral ports assigned temporarily by operating systems
Port 484 lives in the first range—the well-known ports. On Unix-like systems, binding to a well-known port requires superuser privileges2. These ports were meant for fundamental Internet services.
The Integra Software Management Environment
The Integra Software Management Environment was a network management tool registered to port 484. Beyond that, the historical record goes quiet. There's a registration with IANA. There's a name: Randall Dow. There's a port number.
But there's no RFC describing the protocol. No archived documentation explaining how it worked. No companies claiming to still support it.
This isn't unusual. The 1990s saw an explosion of network management tools as organizations tried to monitor increasingly complex distributed systems3. Many got IANA port assignments. Most are now forgotten.
What This Port Tells Us
Port 484 represents something important about how the Internet evolved: not every assigned port becomes essential infrastructure.
The well-known port range contains both the protocols that built the Internet (DNS on 53, HTTP on 80, HTTPS on 443) and dozens of specialized tools that served specific needs at specific moments and then faded.
Port 484 got its assignment. It likely solved real problems for real people. And then the industry moved on—to SNMP, to modern monitoring platforms, to different approaches entirely.
The port assignment remains. The software doesn't.
Checking Port 484 on Your System
Even though port 484 is rarely used, you can check if anything is listening on it:
Linux/Mac:
Windows:
If something is listening, it's worth investigating—it's unlikely to be legitimate traffic to an obsolete network management tool.
Why Unassigned Ports Matter
Wait—port 484 isn't unassigned. It's assigned to integra-sme. But in practice, it might as well be unassigned.
This matters because the well-known port range was intended for services that would be universally recognized. Port 484 shows that even official IANA assignment doesn't guarantee a protocol will survive.
The lesson: assignment is easy, adoption is hard.
Thousands of ports have official assignments. Only a few dozen carry the bulk of the Internet's traffic. The rest exist in registries, artifacts of protocols that mattered once or never quite caught on.
Related Ports
Other network management and monitoring ports from the same era:
- Port 161/162: SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)—still widely used
- Port 199: SMUX (SNMP Unix Multiplexer)
- Port 705: AgentX (SNMP subagent protocol)
SNMP survived. Most others didn't.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Real Story
Port 484 is a tombstone.
Not for a person, but for a piece of software someone built to solve a problem. Someone who went through the process of getting an official IANA port assignment because they believed this tool would matter.
Maybe it did matter, for a while, to someone.
Now it's a number in a registry, a reminder that most of what we build—even the things that get official recognition—eventually fades into the infrastructure's background noise.
The Internet remembers everything and forgets almost everything at the same time.
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