Port 3446: 3Com FAX RPC — A registered port for a dead company

What This Port Is

Port 3446 is a registered port — officially assigned by IANA to 3comfaxrpc, 3Com's fax Remote Procedure Call service. The registration covers both TCP and UDP and was filed in April 2002 by Christopher Wells on behalf of 3Com Corporation.¹

It is not unassigned. It is orphaned.

What 3Com Was

3Com was one of the defining networking companies of the 1990s and early 2000s. The name stood for "Computer, Communication, and Compatibility." They made network interface cards, routers, modems, and enterprise switching equipment. If you had a home network in 2001, there's a decent chance a piece of 3Com hardware was involved.

In 2010, HP acquired 3Com for $2.7 billion.² The 3Com brand was retired. The company ceased to exist as an independent entity. But the IANA port registrations don't automatically expire when companies disappear — they persist, preserved in the registry like insects in amber.

What the Port Was For

RPC — Remote Procedure Call — is a mechanism that lets one program execute code on a remote machine as if it were local. 3Com's fax RPC service appears to have been part of their enterprise fax infrastructure, allowing fax operations to be invoked remotely via a structured protocol interface. This was a common pattern in early-2000s enterprise software: wrap everything in RPC, abstract the hardware, centralize the service.

The fax itself is nearly extinct in consumer contexts. It persists in healthcare, legal, and government workflows — industries where the paper trail matters and change is slow. But the specific 3Com implementation behind port 3446 has no known presence on any modern network.

The Registered Port Range

Port 3446 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). This range is:

• Managed by IANA, which accepts applications to assign specific ports to specific services
• Not restricted by operating systems the way well-known ports (0–1023) are — any process can bind to these ports without elevated privileges
• Home to thousands of legitimate services, from databases to game servers to enterprise middleware

Registration in this range means someone formally claimed the port for a specific purpose. It does not mean the port is actively in use. Many registered ports belong to discontinued products, dead companies, or software that never shipped. The registry is a historical document as much as a functional one.

What You'll Find Here Today

In practice, port 3446 is quiet. There is no known malware that targets it. No major open-source software claims it. If something is listening on port 3446 on your machine, it's almost certainly an application that chose the port for its own reasons — a development server, a local tool, or software that picked a high port and happened to land here.

How to Check What's Listening

On Linux or macOS:

# Show which process is listening on port 3446
ss -tlnp | grep 3446
# or
lsof -i :3446

On Windows:

# Show listening ports with process IDs
netstat -ano | findstr :3446
# Then look up the PID
tasklist | findstr <PID>

If nothing returns, nothing is listening. That's the expected result for port 3446 on most machines.

Why Orphaned Ports Matter

The registered port namespace is finite — 48,127 ports in the registered range, allocated on a first-come basis. Ports claimed by defunct companies or abandoned protocols occupy that space indefinitely. IANA does have a process for reclaiming ports, but it moves slowly and requires affirmative action.

Port 3446 is a minor example of a broader reality: the IANA registry reflects the history of the Internet as much as its current state. Some ports are living infrastructure carrying billions of connections per day. Others are quiet registrations from companies that no longer exist, waiting in the registry long after everyone involved has moved on.