Using Telnet to test a connection and network flow

The ping command has always been an IT person's best friend to do quick network connection checks. How many of you are the family and neighborhood go-to guy to fix anything with buttons? I'm guessing most of you. And as such, if someone told you they were having trouble accessing the Internet from their laptop at home, what is the first thing you would do when you showed up? Try to ping their router, a website, or another computer in their network. You know you would! This has always been a wonderfully quick and easy way to test whether or not you have network traffic flowing between two endpoints. The same troubleshooting procedure exists in all workplaces and corporations. I have even seen many monitoring tools and scripts utilize the results of whether or not a ping replies to report on whether or not a particular service is up and running. If you get a ping reply, it's working, and if it times out, it's down, right?

Not necessarily. The...