portping
--------

This repository contains various versions of a tool for checking the
connectivity of a host via a given port.

All code in this repository is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

A bit of history...
Some time in the early 00s I needed a way of testing whether hosts were
reachable via a given TCP port. Telnet functioned as a poor man's way of doing
this, but I found I needed more and more functionality and at some point telnet
just wasn't cutting it any more. I had a browse around the interwebs and
couldn't find anything at the time that fulfilled my requirements:
 - Very small executable
 - Command-line based
 - Capable of checking TCP and UDP connectivity
 - Usable for measuring connection latencies

I hacked something together myself, which worked well, but was lost to the sands
of time at some point. Since then I've been in various situations where I've
needed the tool again and (because of intellectual property issues or
platform/architecture/OS requirements) I've always had to rewrite it from
scratch.

In doing so, I realised that writing this tool is actually quite a good
quickstart exercise for learning a new language. You have to learn how to parse
command line arguments, branches, loops, exceptions, timing and some basic
networking, among other things. Since realising this, I've regularly rewritten
this tool when learning a new language for my own education.

This repository is an attempt to collect all the various versions of this tool
I've written over the years that aren't implicitly encumbered by a proprietary
licence.

TODO:
 - Locate Ruby and other versions
 - Cleanup Haskell and add comments