When I need to check whether a firewall rule has been opened or whether a service is up and running, I usually run a telnet test, basically "telnet 192.168.1.50 80" for e.g. If a firewall is dropping packets in between, I would get a timeout and if the service port is not up, I would get a connection refused (If I was using a Linux or Unix telnet client).
The problem is that the telnet client on Windows reports timeouts and connection refused errors using the same error message (i.e. a connection cannot be established). The only differentiating factor is that the timeout error only appears after 20 seconds of waiting. That information cannot be captured in a screenshot.
Is there a third party telnet-like tool that I can use for this purpose with better error reporting capabilities?
By the way, I'm not looking for a telnet terminal client per se, I'm only using the telnet protocol to do connectivity testing. Putty, for example, is not very useful for me in this instance, because when it encounters a connection refused, it will just close the whole window, leaving me with no troubleshooting evidence.
Thanks, Wong
telnet
is lightweight and installed nearly everywhere, so I'm curious what flaws it has for simple TCP connectivity testing.