Hi

Is there any command/utility which would help me to ping a network device from solaris box by providing port number as the argument along with the ipaddress.


I tried the following :

/usr/sbin/ping -p <port> <ipaddress>

But this dint work.

Requirement :

I am using an application which would be doing provisioning of some services on a network device. This application works on Sun Solaris.
This application would access the network device using a user mentioned free port. Hence I need to know if the device is accessible on that particular port.

Ping uses ICMP. and the connection you are trying to do would normally be a TCP/UDP. To know if the port is open either use nmap or a similar tool.

If you're writing an application to do this, why wouldn't you just use the socket API to attempt to communicate over the given port? If it's accepted, you know the port is in use. If it times-out, it's being blocked by a firewall. If the connection is refused, you know it's not in use.

Of course, this only works for TCP. You can see if UDP packets are refused, but if they aren't refused it could be either because they were accepted, or because a firewall blocked them.

On the other hand, if you're checking to see whether your service is listening, why wouldn't you just build a test function into it that would respond to a status query?

You may have a look at tcptraceroute package as well. It's an interesting implementation of traceroute where you can choose a tcp/udp port to trace.

For example:

traceroute -p 80 my.host.ip

harisudhan originally asked if there was an external ping method
remote terminal inquires if a server is up ,

there is a new thread and the method is to use TELNET to the port
and if you do not get a timeout response, its a good sign the (remote)
port is responding (with something), i.e. "TELNET aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd 80<CR>"

icmp, tracert, port activity all aside as they don't help to t-shoot that remote

You can use hping utility for the task you need:

hping -s $port $target_hostname

You may use both udp and tcp with different flags set.