Any tools to quickly check if required ports are open?

This is more for a convenience factor. Just wonder if there is any free tool from solarwinds that would check the status of all required ports for solarwinds modules to let you know if they are open or not on your polling engines. I know i could do a powershell script do check like that but was curious if something existed. I think something like that would be helpful to run for new SolarWinds installs and for troubleshooting issues. I have run into problems in the past when our server teams have pushed GPO changes that have changed open ports to closed and then we have to find them open them when that happens, be nice to have something already set that could check all standard ports for solarwinds environment.

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donrobert5

will this do?

FREE Port Scanner | SolarWinds

ecklerwr1

Or just use nmap/zenmap to find out.

wbrown

Have you looked into netstat? This would be run on the server itself rather than from a remote host.

You could run a script that would look into the output to see if a particular string (i.e. the port number when using the "-n" netstat option) and return a code depending on if found or not found.

solaradmin

I used this for a deployment of SCCM. It can be modified via CSV to meet your needs

TechNet CheckPort

rschroeder

I recommend you speak with your Information Security Team. It's likely they have already discovered your devices' open ports using something like Nexpose / Rapid7 / Nexus etc.

If they do NOT have this information for you, please reach out to them for an approved solution for discovering your network. There's no need to install something that they already own, no need to expose your network to a problem.

AND . . . there's no need to do a port-scan and raise red flags in your Security team's SIEM or other tool. So . . . You should tell them why you want this information, then if they don't have it for you, ask them for recommendations for a port-scanner you can use, and instructions how to use it safely in your environment. SolarWinds makes a nice one and includes it in the Engineer's ToolSet, so you might already have what you need to do the discovery.

Then, before you do ANY scanning, please let your I.T. Security team know you're about to do a port scan. Keep in mind that many network devices--especially older ones--don't respond well to connects and disconnects from port-scans. Unfortunately, port-scanning can cause a Denial Of Service to certain kinds of networked devices. It can cause other devices to reboot.

So do your scanning after business hours and you run a slightly lower risk of causing an unintentional outage for someone on your network.

ecklerwr1

I love Rapid7's tools... nessus isn't bad either.

rschroeder

Nessus is ridiculously powerful, and had no easy-to-understand guidelines about what any given level of intensity scan might do to a network. There were no predictions about using it and inadvertently causing a DOS inside our network. I watched it hang Windows print servers and cause Distribution and Core switches to hang and reboot.

Right out of the box, and after every monthly new scan / vulnerability update, it has the power to scan everything in every possible way. And that's NOT helpful to network, except in showing where your equipment will go down when someone scans it with something that may cause it to hang or reboot.

Nessus is only as benevolent as the dumbing-down you put into it. We developed many types of scans based on the kind of devices it would point at. Unfortunately, that simply grandfathered "bad" or vulnerable devices into the network. Worse, devices on the same subnets typically required different scanning solutions, since not all devices are separated by VLAN. And that compounded the complexity of the scans. Trying to ensure we didn't cause an outage during vulnerability discovering, and simultaneously trying to learn the vulnerabilities of all devices, was a tightrope from which we always fell. Eventually, tired of the problems we created using Nessus (and of the gaps in knowledge we had to build into Nessus scans so we would not cause devices to hang or reboot), we replaced Nessus.

I'm impressed with it as a tool, but I'd prefer if it could do its job completely and thoroughly without having to cause (or risk causing) downtime for systems. In a medical environment, where we must scan EVERY device for all vulnerabilities, downtime as the result of a discovery tool is unacceptable.