Port 3426: Arkivio Storage Protocol — A Registered Port with No One Home

Port 3426 sits in a quiet part of the registry. IANA lists it under the registered port range, officially associated with something called the "Arkivio Storage Protocol." But Arkivio, the company behind it, was acquired by Rocket Software in January 2008 — and with it, this port's active life effectively ended.¹

The Registered Port Range

Port 3426 falls in the registered port range: 1024 to 49151. These ports are managed by IANA. Software vendors and standards bodies can apply to claim a port number for their protocol, and IANA records the assignment.²

This is different from the well-known ports (0-1023), which carry foundational protocols like HTTP (80) and SSH (22). Registered ports are for applications — enterprise software, databases, niche protocols. Some are widely known. Many, like 3426, are registered but rarely used in practice.

Registration doesn't mean the protocol is active. It means someone filled out the paperwork.

What Arkivio Was

Arkivio, Inc. was founded around 2000 in Mountain View, California. The company built enterprise storage management software called auto-stor, designed to automatically classify data and move it to the appropriate storage tier — what the industry now calls "information lifecycle management" or ILM.³

The product needed a port to communicate between its management components and managed storage systems. That port was 3426.

In January 2008, Rocket Software acquired Arkivio's assets. Rocket rebranded the product as Rocket Arkivio, but the product's market significance faded. Port 3426 came along for the ride, now effectively a footnote.¹

If you see port 3426 open on a server today, it's almost certainly not Arkivio software. It could be anything — an application that chose a high port arbitrarily, a development server, or a misconfigured service.

Checking What's Listening on Port 3426

If you find port 3426 open on a system you manage, here's how to identify what's using it:

On Linux/macOS:

# Show process listening on port 3426
sudo ss -tlnp | grep 3426

# Or with lsof
sudo lsof -i :3426

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3426

The process ID in the output can be matched to a process name in Task Manager or via:

tasklist /FI "PID eq <PID>"

Why This Matters

The registered port range contains thousands of entries like this one — protocols from software that was acquired, discontinued, or simply never widely adopted. They're placeholders for a moment in time.

This is actually part of how the port system works. Registered ports prevent collision: if two applications independently chose 3426, they'd conflict on any system running both. The registry serializes that space, even if most of the entries are quiet.

When you see an unfamiliar port open on a system, this history is worth keeping in mind. It might be legacy software, a repurposed port number, or something that has nothing to do with the registered service. Check what's actually listening before drawing conclusions.