A new command to figure out ports

Background

Recently in a project as we were doing the setup of the system, our hosting provider made a typo in one of the MANY ports that our solution uses and it cause a lot of confussion.

When creating the VIP (Virtual IPs) and ports mapping and the ports got flipped. Our hosting provider gave us a document saying this are your servers:

IP	server service
10.2.3.120	VIP for live
10.2.3.121	VIP for auth
192.168.1.140	IP for live
192.168.1.141	IP for auth

But we found out it was reversed, .120 was auth and .121 was live.

So after a lot arguing and a lot of hours of explaining what happened, the question was

How to test where the VIPs are pointing?

I had the need to find a way to bring down the server and effectively test that we are hitting a particular server in a specific port, not through the ports that are used by the server and services because sometimes they may not necessarily tell me if I am hitting auth. My options:

• Check the access log in the web server
• Create different data in auth and live (a user or a product that exists in auth but not in live)
• Enable accesslog trace in the app server

Find a way to test without the app server layer?

Solution

From Auth:

1. logon to auth at 192.168.1.141
2. nc -l 5001

From a client try:

1. http://10.2.3.120:5000
2. in auth, check the output of the nc command