On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 12:09:02AM -0500, Jeff Stuart wrote:
Does anyone know of a plugin (or a way) to test a UDP port? Yes, I know that may sound strange (IE UDP IS stateless) but I need to be able to basically test if a port responds or not.
Since there's no handshake in UDP, there is no general way of testing a random UDP port like you can with TCP. What you *can* do is send a packet to the UDP port, and see if you get an ICMP error message back - if you do, then you can safely assume that there is no service running on that port.
The problem is that in many cases you just won't get a reply, in which case you cannot tell for sure if there is a service running or not.
You can run the nmap port scanner in UDP mode and see what is says, but the only really sure way of testing a UDP port is to talk to the service that is supposed to run there, and see if any sensible response comes back to you.
Regards, Henrik