Port 3293: fg-fps — A Name Without a Story

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 3293 is a registered port (range: 1024–49151). This middle range sits between the well-known ports (0–1023, reserved for major protocols like HTTP, SSH, and DNS) and the ephemeral ports (49152–65535, used for temporary connections).

Registered ports are assigned by IANA on a first-come, first-served basis per RFC 6335.¹ Any organization or developer can apply to claim one. The idea is to reduce port collisions — if you're building software that needs a dedicated port, you register it so others know to stay away.

The IANA Entry

IANA's registry lists port 3293 (TCP and UDP) under the service name fg-fps.²

That's where the paper trail ends.

There's no description in the registry. No RFC. No link to documentation. No organization name on the registration. "fg-fps" is two abbreviations joined by a hyphen, and neither the abbreviation expansion nor the software behind it appears anywhere in public technical documentation.

The most plausible guesses — FortiGate something, Fantasy Grounds something, some Frame-Per-Second metric system — remain guesses. None of them connect to port 3293 in any verifiable way.

Known Unofficial Uses

None documented. Security databases don't flag this port for malware associations. It doesn't appear in network traffic analysis tools as a common application fingerprint. If software is using this port, it's doing so quietly.

How to Check What's Listening

If you're seeing traffic on port 3293 and want to know what's using it:

On Linux/macOS:

sudo ss -tlnp | grep 3293
sudo lsof -i :3293

On Windows (Command Prompt, run as Administrator):

netstat -ano | findstr :3293

Then cross-reference the PID with Task Manager or:

tasklist /fi "PID eq <PID>"

With nmap (from another machine):

nmap -sV -p 3293 <target-ip>

The -sV flag attempts to identify the service by its response behavior, independent of what IANA says the port should be.

Why This Matters

Unassigned or undocumented registered ports reveal something honest about how the port system works. IANA's registry is not a directory of living, documented services — it's a historical ledger. Names get registered and then never implemented, or implemented and then abandoned, or implemented in software that never gained traction and has since disappeared.

Port 3293 is a reminder that a name in the registry means someone, at some point, thought this port was worth claiming. What they built with it — if anything — didn't make it into the public record.