Port 2966 is registered with IANA under the name IDP-Infotrieve, assigned to both TCP and UDP. The registrant was Kevin Bruckert at IDP Co. The contact email is kbruckert@idpco.com. Neither the company nor the service appears to be in active use.
Infotrieve was a document delivery and information management company — the kind of service that corporations used to retrieve journal articles, research papers, and other published content on demand. It was acquired by Copyright Clearance Center in November 2014 for $21.13 million.1 The original IDP Co. that registered this port predates or existed alongside Infotrieve. Whatever software ran on port 2966, it didn't survive the acquisition.
The port remains in the IANA registry. It's not available for reassignment — IANA doesn't recycle registered ports — so 2966 will carry the IDP-Infotrieve label indefinitely, a nameplate on an empty office.
What Range This Port Belongs To
Port 2966 falls in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services upon request, but unlike the well-known ports (0–1023), they don't require root or administrator privileges to use. Any software can open a registered port on most operating systems.
Registered doesn't mean active. The registry is a historical record as much as it is a live directory. Hundreds of registered ports point to services, companies, and software projects that have since disappeared.
Is Anything Commonly Running Here?
No commonly observed unofficial uses have been documented for port 2966. It's not associated with any known malware, network appliance, gaming service, or peer-to-peer application in publicly available security intelligence.2
If you see traffic on port 2966 on your network, it warrants investigation — but there's no baseline "expected" service to explain it.
How to Check What's Listening on This Port
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
The process ID in the output can be matched to a running application in Task Manager or with tasklist.
With nmap (from another machine):
The -sV flag attempts to identify what service is actually running, regardless of what IANA says the port is for.
Why Unassigned — or Abandoned — Ports Matter
The port registry is a snapshot of software history. Ports registered by companies that no longer exist, for protocols that were never widely adopted, still take up space in the namespace. They can't be reclaimed, reassigned, or officially repurposed.
This matters because:
- Security tools use the registry as a baseline. Unexpected traffic on a registered port can trigger false confidence — "oh, that's IDP-Infotrieve" — when the real question is why anything is using that port at all.
- The namespace is finite. With 65,535 ports total and only 48,128 in the registered range, abandoned registrations are a permanent loss. IANA's policy doesn't include a sunset mechanism.
- Ghost ports accumulate. As software companies die, merge, or pivot, their port registrations remain. The registry slowly fills with historical artifacts.
Port 2966 is one of hundreds in this condition: formally registered, functionally empty, and quietly permanent.
Frequently Asked Questions
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