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Zephyr Hostmanager
Port 2104 is primarily used by the Zephyr Notification Service component, Hostmanager, within MIT's Project Athena environment. It facilitates the delivery of real-time notifications and messaging services among users and systems, supporting both TCP and UDP protocols. Despite being a legacy system, Zephyr remains a key technology within educational campuses and research environments to provide alerts and collaboration notifications..
Zephyr is a real-time messaging and notification service originally developed as part of MIT's Project Athena. The Zephyr system allows users and applications to exchange instant notifications across distributed computing environments. It is designed with a publish-subscribe model, where 'clients' subscribe to certain message classes and instances, receiving notifications relevant to their interests.
Port 2104 is associated with the Zephyr Hostmanager (zephyr-hm) component, which coordinates the delivery of these notifications within the network. The Hostmanager handles routing messages, managing subscriptions, presence information, and maintaining session state. Both TCP and UDP are used for communication depending on the reliability and latency needs of the particular operation.
Architecturally, Zephyr operates over standard IP networking stacks and typically integrates with Kerberos for authentication. Despite age, Zephyr's publish-subscribe and notification capabilities inspired messaging patterns still in use today. Modern systems may use it in legacy environments or for compatibility with existing infrastructure.