Port 194 IRC – Free, Online, Private

What listens on 194

Port 194 is the IANA assignment for IRC. The service name is irc, Internet Relay Chat Protocol. The registry lists TCP and UDP. IRC as people run it is TCP. The historical operational ports are 6667 for cleartext and 6697 for TLS, and those are what clients default to. 194 is in the well-known range, so a server that actually binds it needs privilege. Most IRC daemons never did, which is why the assigned port and the port in the client differ. If you are debugging a modern network, test 6697 before you spend time on 194.

The IANA service name is irc: Internet Relay Chat Protocol. The practical transport is TCP. The checks below use TCP. IANA may also have a UDP row for 194. The service described here is the TCP one. A process can bind this port without being the service in the registry. The commands show who bound it. They do not prove the protocol on the wire is the one IANA named.

Service notes for port 194

Service notes for port 194: the IANA name is irc (Internet Relay Chat Protocol), and the program people mean is IRC. TCP 194 is the IANA irc port. Most networks never used it. They use 6667 and 6697, which are not this assignment. Cleartext IRC leaks the password used to identify to nick services and everything said in the channel. Prefer TLS on 6697. A public IRC daemon is a content and abuse problem as much as a port problem: open proxies via DCC, and spam. If you do not operate a network, nothing should listen on 194, 6667, or 6697. An old eggdrop or a container someone published for a demo will still be listening after the demo. Nothing in that paragraph applies to a different number just because the software family is similar. If your listener is not on 194, you are on the wrong page.

A client pointed at 194 fails against a server that listens on 6667, and the error is connection refused, which looks like an outage. Read the server's real port. A firewall that opened 194 because a textbook said so, and not 6697, is the matching mistake. Another trap is a bouncer on 6667 on a host you thought was idle. ss names the binary.

How to check whether it is open

On the machine itself, ask the kernel which socket is bound. ss and lsof do that. A firewall, a security group, and a Docker publish rule sit in front of that socket, so a listener is not the same thing as a port the internet can use. From somewhere else, nc -vz host 194 tries a TCP handshake when the command is the TCP form. A refusal means something answered with a reset. A timeout means a filter dropped the packet or the host is unreachable. Those are different faults. Search for TCP 194 and also for 6667 and 6697 if you are hunting an IRC daemon. A banner or a TLS handshake is the protocol test. UDP 194 is not the chat session.

grep and findstr match text. A pattern of :80 also matches :8080 and :8000. The lsof and Get-NetTCPConnection forms take a numeric port and do not have that substring bug. Use them when the number is ambiguous. ss filters in the kernel with sport = :N, which is also exact. On macOS, netstat -p selects a protocol. It does not print the process the way Linux netstat -p does. lsof prints the process.

• IANA says 194. Operational IRC is usually 6667 or 6697. Check the one the daemon was given.
• 6697 is TLS. Speaking cleartext to it fails, and speaking TLS to 6667 fails.
• UDP is registered and is not how clients connect.
• A closed 194 does not mean IRC is absent. Look at the high ports the config names.

Linuxsudo ss -lptn 'sport = :194'
sudo lsof -nP -iTCP:194 -sTCP:LISTEN

macOSsudo lsof -nP -iTCP:194 -sTCP:LISTEN
netstat -anv -p tcp | grep '\.194[^0-9]'

Windowsnetstat -ano | findstr :194
Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 194

Remotenc -vz host 194