Port 60844 — The Unassigned Port

What This Port Range Is

Port 60844 lives in the Dynamic and Private Ports range: 49152–65535.¹ This range was formally designated by IANA in 2011 through RFC 6335² as reserved for temporary, local, and private use. The defining characteristic: IANA never assigns these ports to official services. They belong to everyone and no one.

This is by design. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority deliberately left 16,384 port numbers (49152–65535) unassigned, recognizing that hosts and applications needed the freedom to create temporary connections without asking permission. When you connect to a server, your machine grabs a dynamic port from this range as its "return address." The connection lives for minutes, then the port is released back into the commons.

Known Unofficial Use: Apple Xsan

Port 60844 has one documented unofficial use: Apple Xsan Filesystem Access.³ Xsan is Apple's Storage Area Network filesystem—a system that lets multiple Mac computers access shared block storage simultaneously over a network.⁴ Xsan clients across the dynamic port range, including 60844, to communicate with the storage metadata controllers and other clients.

Xsan reached the end of its life when Apple discontinued support, but the port number lingers in network traffic logs and configuration files—a ghost of Apple's brief venture into enterprise storage systems.

How to Find What's Using This Port

If port 60844 is active on your system, you can identify what's listening:

On Linux/macOS:

sudo lsof -i :60844
sudo netstat -tulpn | grep 60844
sudo ss -tulpn | grep 60844

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :60844
Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 60844 | Select-Object OwningProcess

These commands will show you the process ID and application name bound to this port. In most cases, you'll see nothing—the port is just part of the available pool.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The dynamic port range is the Internet's frontier. Every temporary client connection, every local service experiment, every ephemeral tunnel uses ports from this range. Port 60844 might be silent on your machine most of the time, but somewhere right now, millions of connections are using ports just like it.

Without this range—without IANA's decision to leave these ports unassigned—the Internet would need bureaucratic approval for every temporary connection. Instead, we have freedom. That's the real story of port 60844. It's not what it carries that matters. It's that it was left unowned, available, free to be claimed by whatever application needs it next.