Port 2942: SM-PAS-5 — Equitrac's Reserved Slice of the Registry

What Port 2942 Is

Port 2942 is a registered port — sitting in the 1024–49151 range that IANA assigns to specific services and products on request. Unlike well-known ports (0–1023), registered ports don't require administrative privileges to use, but they do carry an implied claim: someone registered them for a reason.

In this case, the reason is Equitrac.

The SM-PAS Family

Port 2942 doesn't stand alone. It's the fifth in a consecutive block registered by Tom Haapanen under the name SM-PAS:

What does SM-PAS stand for? IANA's registry doesn't say. No public RFC defines it. No open specification describes the protocol. What the Equitrac documentation does confirm is that ports across this range handle inter-component communication between Equitrac's internal services — the engines responsible for tracking print jobs, managing device access, and accounting for usage across enterprise networks.¹

Port 2942 specifically appears in Equitrac's documentation as a communication channel for the DME (Document Management Engine) component, handling traffic between internal Equitrac services.²

What Equitrac Is

Equitrac is enterprise print management software — the kind deployed in large law firms, universities, and corporations to track who printed what, charge it back to the right department, and enforce print quotas. It was created independently, acquired by Xerox, then by Kofax, then by Tungsten Automation (formerly Kofax). The software is still actively sold and deployed.³

Outside of environments running Equitrac, port 2942 carries no traffic. It is not a port you will encounter on the general Internet.

What the Registered Range Means

The registered port range (1024–49151) contains thousands of entries like this one: real registrations, made by real companies, for real internal protocols that never needed public documentation. The registry is a reservation system, not a specification library.

When you see a port in this range with no familiar name, it almost always means one of three things:

• A commercial product's internal communication channel (like SM-PAS-5)
• A registration that was made and then abandoned when the product died
• An ephemeral port assigned dynamically by the OS for outbound connections

Port 2942 falls into the first category — for now.

How to Check What's Listening on Port 2942

If you see activity on port 2942 on your own system:

macOS / Linux:

lsof -i :2942

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2942

Then cross-reference the PID with Task Manager.

If you're running Equitrac, port 2942 is expected and normal — it's the software communicating between its own components. If you're not running Equitrac and something is on this port, investigate the process.