What is "Radan HTTP"?

Question

There is a service using the 8088 port on a Linux server I use. It identifies itself as radan-http, and indeed it's on the IANA port list. It is apparently being used by Nginx.

But, despite a fair amount of searching, I haven't been able to find out what it is. Is there documentation for it and what it does somewhere?

Solution

The port itself (8088) was originally registered to Radan for vendor-specific HTTP traffic. It has since been co-opted by the general public for use for proxies (along with 8000, 8080, 8888).

I have a feeling it's not Nginx identifying itself as Radan, but that the software you are using to scan is just referencing the IANA port list.

Comments

[mattdm]

This seems right, but I think it's probably not scanning software, just netstat, which reads from /etc/services, which uses names from the IANA list linked to in the question.

[Hyppy]

@mattdm true, that's also a possibility. I guess one could somehow find a linguistic/technical way to argue that netstat is some branch variety of 'scanning software' ;-)