Port 2059: BMC Messaging Service — A Name Without a Story

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 2059 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These are ports that organizations and developers can formally register with IANA, the body that keeps order in the numbering system. Registration doesn't mean the port is in active use — it means someone, at some point, filed the paperwork.

Compare this to the well-known ports (0–1023), where HTTP lives at 80 and SSH at 22, or the ephemeral ports (49152–65535), which operating systems hand out temporarily to client connections. Registered ports are the middle ground: not universally reserved, not randomly assigned, but claimed by specific services with specific purposes.

What Port 2059 Is Officially Registered To

IANA's registry lists port 2059 as belonging to "BMC Messaging Service" (service name: bmc-messaging), registered for both TCP and UDP. The contact listed is Portnoy Boxman.¹

That's approximately all the documentation that exists.

BMC Software is a large enterprise IT management company — makers of Remedy, TrueSight, and various mainframe tools. Which of their products uses port 2059, and what that messaging service does, is not documented in any public-facing resource. The registration exists. The service behind it is opaque.

This happens more than you'd think. The IANA registry has thousands of entries like this: a name, a number, a contact, and silence.

Is Anything Listening on Port 2059 on Your System?

Almost certainly not, unless you're running BMC enterprise software. To check:

Linux/macOS:

ss -tlnp | grep 2059
# or
lsof -i :2059

Windows:

netstat -aon | findstr :2059

If something is listening and you don't know what it is, the process ID from those commands will help you trace it back to an application.

Why This Matters

The registered ports range contains 48,127 numbers. Most of them are quiet — claimed, unclaimed, or claimed-and-forgotten. Port 2059 is a reminder that the port registry is not a catalog of active services. It's more like a land registry: you can own a plot without building anything on it.

If you're investigating network traffic on port 2059 and finding unexpected connections, that's worth investigating regardless of what IANA says the port is "for." Registered assignments don't bind how software actually behaves in the wild.