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Davie
Asked: 2009-10-09 01:57:50 +0800 CST

Ping a Specific Port

  • 772

Just a quick sanity check here.

Can you ping a specific port of a machine, and if so, can you provide an example?

I'm looking for something like ping ip address portNum.

ping

18 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can't ping ports, as Ping is using ICMP which is an internet layer protocol that doesn't have ports. Ports belong to the transport layer protocols like TCP and UDP.

    However, you could use nmap to see whether ports are open or not

    nmap -p 80 example.com

    Edit: As flokra mentioned, nmap is more than just a ping-for-ports-thingy. It's the security auditers and hackers best friend and comes with tons of cool options. Check the doc for all possible flags.

    • 824

  2. Open a telnet session to the specific port, for example:

    # telnet google.com 80
Trying 74.125.226.48...
Connected to google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

    To close your session, hit Ctrl+].

    • 218

  3. If you're on a windows installation with powershell v4 or newer, you can use the test-netconnection powershell module:

    Test-NetConnection <host> -port <port>

    Example: Test-NetConnection example.com -port 80

    This cmdlet also has the alias tnc. Eg tnc example.com -port 80

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  4. $ nc -vz google.com 80
Connection to google.com 80 port [tcp/http] succeeded!
    • 121

  5. You can use PaPing:

    http://code.google.com/p/paping

    C:\>paping.exe www.google.com -p 80 -c 4
paping v1.5.1 - Copyright (c) 2010 Mike Lovell

Connecting to www.l.google.com [209.85.225.147] on TCP 80:

Connected to 209.85.225.147: time=24.00ms protocol=TCP port=80
Connected to 209.85.225.147: time=25.00ms protocol=TCP port=80
Connected to 209.85.225.147: time=24.00ms protocol=TCP port=80
Connected to 209.85.225.147: time=24.00ms protocol=TCP port=80

Connection statistics:
        Attempted = 4, Connected = 4, Failed = 0 (0.00%)
Approximate connection times:
        Minimum = 24.00ms, Maximum = 25.00ms, Average = 24.25ms
    • 84

  6. Try curl command, like:

    $ curl host:port

    For example:

    $ curl -s localhost:80 >/dev/null && echo Success. || echo Fail.
Success.

    Above command will return Fail on a non-zero exit status codes. In some particular cases, such as empty or malformed response (see man curl), you may want to handle specific exit codes as successful, so please check this post for more detailed explanation.

    • 37

  7. No, you can't, because ping uses the ICMP protocol, which doesn't even have a concept of ports.

    • 30

  8. I found a simpler solution using PsPing:

    psping 192.168.2.2:5000

    It's part of Windows Sysinternals.

    PsPing implements Ping functionality, TCP ping, latency and bandwidth measurement.

    • 27

  9. On Linux you can use hping but it uses TCP, rather than ICMP.

    hping example.com -S -V -p 80
    • 18

  10. Ping is very specific but if you want to check whether a port is open or not, and are running a Windows box then PortQry is your friend.

    I've only used it for testing Domain Controllers for connectivity issues, but it worked a treat for that, so should work for you.

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