Easy way to Test the Listening Ports on Windows Systems

A nice tool that you can use is Microsoft’s free PortQueryUI. It provides a GUI for the portqry.exe command-line tool, which is installed by default on recent Windows OS versions.

  1. Run portqueryui.exe.
  2. In the Port Query dialog box, enter the destination IP address or Fully Qualified Domain Name(FQDN) to query. In this case, you can enter 127.0.0.1 or localhost.
  3. Select Manually input query ports and type 443 in the Ports to query field. (By default, TCP is selected in the Protocol drop-down list).
  4. Click the Query button. The status of port 443 is displayed in the bottom pane of the Port Query dialog box.

How to Generate Crash Dump for VMware Virtual Machine Guest

Vmss2core is a tool to convert VMware checkpoint state files into formats that third party debugger tools understand. It can handle both suspend (.vmss) and snapshot (.vmsn) checkpoint state files .The vmss2core tool can produce core dump files for the Windows debugger (WinDbg), Red Hat crash compatible core files, a physical memory view suitable for the Gnu debugger gdb, Solaris MDB (XXX), and Mac OS X formats.

Steps are as follows:

  1. Take the Snapshot of the Virtual Machine which is hung or unresponsive state. Which will create .vmsn file in the virtual machine directory.
  2. Select the .vmsn or .vmss file and download to  your local machine where you are going to  save the Vmss2core utility.
  3. Place the downloaded file (vmss2core_win.exe)  in your local drive (C:\ or D:\). Ensure  your Windows machine is installed with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 runtime. Place both the Vmss2core file and downloaded .vmsn or .vmss file in same location.
  4. Execute the below commands to generate core dump. The vmss2core tool can produce core dump files for the Windows debugger (WinDbg), Red Hat crash compatible core files, a physical memory view suitable for the Gnu debugger gdb, Solaris MDB (XXX), and Mac OS X formats.

    Example: c:\>vmss2core_win.exe -M VC-1-Snapshot3.vmsn