What This Port Is
Port 60879 has no official name. It carries no standardized protocol. The IANA—the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority that maintains the official registry of port assignments—has never assigned it to anything. 1
This port belongs to a range: 49152–65535, known as the dynamic or ephemeral port range. These are the ports that the Internet uses for temporary connections.
Why This Range Matters
When you open a browser and visit a website, your computer needs to identify itself in the conversation. It picks a port number from this range—the ephemeral range—to mark its side of the connection. That port number is essentially an ID that says: "This is the conversation between my port and the server's port 443."
The number doesn't matter. The port number chosen is usually arbitrary, sometimes random. Your browser might use 60879 for one request, then 52341 for the next. These ports are meant to be temporary. They're born for a moment, used, and discarded.
Port 60879 is one of 16,384 ports in this range. Most of the time, it carries connections that last seconds. It's a slot in a vast carousel of temporary numbers.
What Might Use This Port
If you find something listening on port 60879, it will almost always be one of these:
1. An outbound client connection — Your computer is connecting to a server somewhere, and it happened to use this port number as its identifier. This is the most common case.
2. A custom application — Some software you installed decided to claim this port for itself. Since it's unassigned, nothing prevents it. Perhaps a database client, a development tool, a game server, or an IoT device.
3. An RPC service — Windows and some Linux systems use dynamic port assignment for RPC (Remote Procedure Call) services. When an RPC service needs a TCP or UDP port, it might grab something from this range. That something could be 60879.
4. A leftover from a crash — A process ended abruptly and didn't properly close its port. The port sits marked as "in use" until the operating system frees it.
Essentially: if something is listening on port 60879, it's either temporary or undocumented. There's no official owner. No RFC defines its behavior. No standard says what should live here.
How to Check What's Using It
On Linux or macOS:
Or:
On Windows:
The output will show you the process ID. From there, you can identify which application owns the connection.
Why you might see it: If you run these commands at random times, you probably won't find anything. Port 60879 is likely idle right now. But at any given moment, across the world, thousands of connections are flowing through ports in this range. Most of them are invisible to you unless you're actively looking.
Why Unassigned Ports Matter
The official port registry—maintained by IANA—contains roughly 500 well-known ports (0–1023) and a few thousand registered ports (1024–49151). These are the named doors. SSH, HTTP, DNS, SMTP—they have numbers assigned by committee, documented in RFCs, respected by implementations.
But the Internet would grind to a halt if every connection needed an officially assigned port. The ephemeral range (49152–65535) exists specifically so systems can create temporary ports without asking permission.
Port 60879 is one of 16,384 slots in that permission-free space. It's part of the Internet's democratic layer—the part that doesn't care what you do, as long as you're not blocking someone else. Most of the time, it carries conversations that matter to no one but the two endpoints having them.
The Honest Truth
Port 60879 is a good metaphor for how much of the Internet actually works: anonymous, temporary, purposeful only in the moment it matters. It opens, it closes, it's reused. It has no name because it doesn't need one. It exists in the noise of 16,000 other identical ports, all serving the same function: let two systems remember which conversation is which.
If you're seeing traffic on port 60879, it's probably nothing to worry about. Unless it's something unusual for your system, it's just the Internet doing what it does—creating doors that last only as long as they're needed.
See Also
- Port 1024 — The boundary between the official world (0–1023) and everything else
- Port 49151 — The last assigned port before the ephemeral range begins
- Ephemeral ports generally — The invisible infrastructure that makes temporary connections possible
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