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pping

Alexander Schmidt  |  March 01, 2020

Our famous port ping tool written in .NET Core


Introduction

I don’t remember exactly when the idea of a simple solution to checking opened ports on machines came into my mind. All I know is that this task was unnecessary painful to me. So I thought about what would be the ideal solution. I came up with the idea that I want the exact same behavior ping gives me on the console and I wished I just could add a port number to it and it will work.

This is exactly the core functionallity behind pping (and thus the name!).

Installation

The easiest way to obtain and manage pping on your machine is to use chocolatey:

Chocolatey Version

Chocolatey page for pping

choco install pping

If you don’t want to pre-install choco on your box you could download the latest version via

  • Windows x64: Latest version (SHA256: 6F98462191A770DF0592EE8FE91A2C4F4834092402BA8B673C1C2430EA2E45FB)
  • Linux x64: Latest version (SHA256: C1962DB9679A0E8E7BEE7E86A7DC7B7A1AA637FDB4B4D9D365623EBB024FCC72)

and extract the contents of this 7zip into any folder. Then set add the directory you choosen to your PATH and use the tool.

Basic usage

The simplest possible call would be to check a single port on a DNS address or IP address. The following snippets checks, if port 80 is open on the address google.com:

pping google.com 80

The result will be something like this:

> pping google.com 80
Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80 4 times:
#   1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:-). 4 pings sent (4 OPEN, 0 CLOSED)

By default pping will try to reach a port 4 times.If you want pping to resolve the IP address behind a DNS entry just add the -res parameter:

pping google.com 80 -res

Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80 4 times:
#   1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e). 4 pings sent (4 OPEN, 0 CLOSED)

You can perform constant pings too:

pping google.com 80 -t

This will perform and “endless” ping to the address.

Special usage

Waiting for a port to open

On of the common scenarios to use ping is to determine, if a certain service is already up. Consider a situation where you restart a server and want to know, when RDP connections are possible. A simple ping would’nt help you here because even if the machine is up, the RDP port (3389) might no be reachable yet.

pping can help you in this situation:

pping myserver.local 3389 -t -as

You perform a permanent pping (-t) but you tell pping to stop pinging when the port is reachable the first time (-as). “as” is the abbreviation for “autostop”.

Multiple ports

If you want to check lets say 2 ports (http and https) on a certain address. Just delimit the ports by ,:

pping google.com 80,443 -d

Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80,443 4 times:
#   1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
#   2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
#   3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   5 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   6 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   7 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
#   8 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: OPEN
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:-). 8 pings sent (6 OPEN, 2 CLOSED)

It is also possible to define a range of ports by delimiting them with ’-‘:

pping google.com 80-82 -d                                                              
Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80-82 4 times:                           
#   1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN              
#   2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
#   3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
#   4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN              
#   5 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
#   6 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
#   7 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN              
#   8 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
#   9 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
#  10 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN              
#  11 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
#  12 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut) 
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:-). 12 pings sent (4 OPEN, 8 CLOSED)                

Option table

The following table lists all available options:

Abbreviation Full name Sample Purpose
t endless -t Perform a constant pping.
r repeats -r 10 Number of repeats in a non-endless pping (defaults to 4)
tim timeout -tim 2 Timeout in seconds (defaults to 1)
l logo -logo If provided, pping will print detailed header informations.
res resolve -res If provided, pping will resolve the IP address for each pping.
a autostop -a If provided, pping will stop operation on the first opened port.
els elsucc -els If provided, the process will retrieve the amount of opened ports as the process-result to DOS.
elf elfail -elf If provided, the process will return 0 if there was at least one open port, otherwise it returns 1.
w waittime -w 2000 The amount of milliseconds to wait between 2 ppings.
d detailed -d If provided, pping will try to write reason details at closed ports to te console.
4 ipv4 -4 If provided, pping will use IPv4 for resolutions.
6 ipv6 -6 If provided, pping will use IPv6 for resolutions.

Alexander Schmidt

Written by Alexander Schmidt who lives and works in Magdeburg building useful things. You should follow him on Youtube