Network Troubleshooting Tools - How to Ping a Specific Port from Windows
How often do we, as system admins, find ourselves with a strange error that might be due to network connectivity? Pretty often, in my experience. While Ping is a great tool for validating basic routing, we live in a world of firewalls – be they physically on the network, virtually on the network, or software installed on the server. When diagnosing network connectivity issues, Ping is not good enough, as that only tests the ICMP network flow. You can’t ping a specific port in Windows, so if you’re looking to test something like HTTPS (TCP 443), with Ping you’re out of luck. Fortunately, there are many other tools available. My favorite tool is PortQry (that link will work as long as Microsoft graces us with a consistent URL… so until tomorrow, probably). PortQry was originally a SysInternals tool (developed for Windows 2000!) and is still one of the best. You’ll have to download it, but it’s a simple executable that you can invoke fro...