September 19, 2012 Always Learning IT - Portqry - Port Query Tool

After 20 years in the business of IT, longer if you go into my childhood years, I have seen and done many things when it comes to IT. Maintenance and troubleshooting being the primary activities of any hard core IT guy. From that you develop your own personal style, tricks, and tools to help you along your way.

I am always on the lookout for the next hidden tool to make my life easier, enabling me to do more with less and as quickly as possible. A few days ago I was working with another engineer, one that I haven't worked with before, on an Active Directory Certificate issue. I was watching him go through all the steps and use all the tools I would use until he popped open a command window and typed in a command I was not familiar with. He received his results and moved on. Now, I will be the first one to tout the latest and greatest, but this post is borderline embarrassing to me.

Side note - another engineer who is new, yet more a veteran in Active Directory than I was also caught off guard by this "new" tool.

The troubleshooting step we were doing to make sure the LDAPS port (636) was listening on the domain controller. Now, I have always done the old school method and telnet to the port. If it answers, its obviously listening. It's quick, easy, and I have been doing it that way for over a decade. Not anymore.

The command he used was portqry. A simple, small tool offered from Microsoft since 2003 (which makes it more embarrassing to admit I never heard of it before). Download it here.

Unpack it in the Windows folder or edit your PATH so you can run it anywhere in the command window.

Use
c:\>portqry -n IP -e port

Result

querying...

TCP port 636 (ldaps service): LISTENING

Simple, easy, more informative than the loose guess from a telnet hit.

End of Line.

Posted in: HowTo,Microsoft,Software