You can also check the newer ejabberd guide

mfoss — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:59:08 +0000

In addition to the link provided by Evadim, you can also check the ejabberd guide, since version 2.0.1 includes some explanations about this topic.

I summarize them here again:

tony.bigbee wrote:

Are these sockets necessary for ejabberd functionality?

Not strictly for Jabber support. Those ports are used by the ejabberdctl command line administration script, commonly used to stop and restart ejabberd. They are also used for clustering if required.

tony.bigbee wrote:

Is this something specific to the Erlang VM?

Yes, that is implemented by Erlang/OTP, hence the options to control it must be passed to 'erl' when starting ejabberd. Check bellow.

tony.bigbee wrote:

I cannot find a port range that includes 51842 in the config file.
Is there any way to control this?

When starting the Erlang VM for ejabberd (usually this is done in a script called ejabberdctl or ejabberd), you can include:

erl ... -kernel inet_dist_listen_min 4370 inet_dist_listen_max 4375

http://www.ejabberd.im/listen

evadim — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:22:57 +0000

http://www.ejabberd.im/listen-strange-port ?

ejabberd - Comments for "beam (erlang vm) use of tcp-ip socket ports?"

You can also check the newer ejabberd guide

http://www.ejabberd.im/listen