I'm doing some troubleshooting on a multi-server redhat 6 system that should be communicating over ports 8003 and 30002. However, when I run netstat -ap I see 'mcreport' and 'pago-services2' where I expect to see 8003 and 30002, respectively. Below is an example
tcp 0 0 localhost:55821 localhost:mcreport ESTABLISHED 5501/Program1
tcp 0 0 localhost:55816 localhost:mcreport ESTABLISHED 5673/Program2
tcp 0 0 localhost:mcreport localhost:55782 ESTABLISHED 4938/Program3
tcp 0 0 localhost:55796 localhost:mcreport ESTABLISHED 5651/Program4
udp 0 0 localhost:40956 localhost:pago-services2 ESTABLISHED 5501/Program5
udp 0 0 localhost:60156 localhost:pago-services2 ESTABLISHED 5673/Program6
udp 0 0 localhost:56702 localhost:pago-services2 ESTABLISHED 5360/Program7
udp 0 0 localhost:34691 localhost:pago-services2 ESTABLISHED 4935/Program8
udp 0 0 localhost:50566 localhost:pago-services2 ESTABLISHED 5115/Program9
I've tried to figure out what these services are, but all I've been able to determine is that mcreport is "Mulberry Connect Reporting Service" and that the services in question commonly use the ports that they're hogging.
Has anyone run into these before? Do you know where I could find more information about them?
Some of my coworkers found the source:
/etc/services contains a list of ports and names to associate with them. This allows programs to access a port by name, much like how hosts functions with IP addresses. I don't believe that these associations cause issues, but removing ones associated with programs you don't have shouldn't hurt either.
My services file contained a huge list of default associations, which I believe were pulled from IANA. I deleted a large swath of these, and netstat now resolves the numbers that I expect.
I haven't run into issues yet, but if I do I will roll back to the original services file and only comment out the ports that bother me.
In summary: This is probably a harmless issue, but you can comment out the strange port associations if you wish.