title: Windows Tool or utility to validate remote TCP / UDP ports are accessible over the network?
body: <p>I am trying to find somw Windows based tools that can help me validate TCP and UDP connection on remote machines.</p>
  
  <h1>My Problem (just one use case):</h1>
  
  <p>At work, I manage many clustered servers that I run load tests against. In order to get a rich test, I use Jmeter-Plugins which provides a Server agent that opens a TCP socket on port 4444 on a target remote machine: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/jmeter-plugins/wiki/PerfMonAgent" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/jmeter-plugins/wiki/PerfMonAgent</a></p>
  
  <p>There are many times when I setup a new load test farm, that either the network, or the server configuration, or the ServerAgent itself can have issues and thus not allowing a Load test client to access that TCP connection.</p>
  
  <p>The issue I have is that I dont know what part of the system is broken.</p>
  
  <h1>What I think I need:</h1>
  
  <p>I would like to know how I can open a TCP (not HTTP with cUrl), connection to a remote server to validate that the network allows the connection, as well as the Server firewall allows the given TCP connection to be accessed remotely.</p>
  
  <h1>What I have looked:</h1>
  
  <p>These are some of the tools I have looked at so far:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Nmap  <a href="http://nmap.org" rel="nofollow">http://nmap.org</a></p></li>
  <li><p>Ncat  <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap-ncat/" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap-ncat/</a></p></li>
  <li><p>TCP/IP Builder    <a href="http://www.drk.com.ar" rel="nofollow">http://www.drk.com.ar</a> </p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Zenmap 6.01 and nmap might do the job I want, but some machines where not accessible to Zenmap when I know 100% that the server was accessible via HTTP, so that was strange.</p>
  
  <p>I have looked at many tools and either they:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Dont allow remote connections</li>
  <li>Dont seem to want to connect to a TCP socket</li>
  <li>Or I dont understand the tools to accomplish the validation I stated above.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I would greatly appreciate all comment and suggestions to help with this re-occurring problem I face.</p>