Knowing the Moment a Port Opens

Automated Attempts

Sometimes when a server is rebooted, whether a clean soft reboot or a hard reboot after a crash, I need to perform a task on it as quickly as possible. This can be for many reasons like ensuring all services are started to making a quick change. Sometimes I just need to know the moment a certain service is started to notify everyone of this fact. The point is that every second counts.

When the servers starts up and the network is joined you can start receiving ping responses from the server. At this point all the services haven’t started up yet (on most configurations at least), so I can’t necessarily log into the server or access the specific service, yet. Attempting to do so I would get a connection refused or port closed error.

What I usually do in cases where I urgently need to log back into the server is ping the IP address and wait for the first response packet. When I receive this packet I know the server is almost finished booting up. Now I just need to wait for the remote access service to start up. For Linux boxes this is SSH and for Windows boxes it’s RDP (remote desktop protocol).

I could try to repeatedly connect to it, but this is unnecessarily manual, and when every second counts probably less than optimal. Depending on what I’m trying to do I have different methods of automating this.

If I just needed to know that a certain service is started and available again, I would put a netcat session in a loop, which would repeatedly attempt a connection. As long as the service isn’t ready (the port is closed), the netcat command will fail and exit. The loop will then wait for 1 second and try again. As soon as the port opens the connection will succeed and netcat will print a message stating the connection is established and then wait for input (meaning the loop will stop iterating). At this point I can just cancel the whole command and notify everyone that it’s up and running. The command for doing this is as follows:

while true; do nc -v 10.0.0.221 80; sleep 1; done

If I needed remote access to the server, I would use a similar command as above, but use the remote access command instead, and add a break statement to quit the loop after the command was successful. For example, for an SSH session I would use the ssh command, and for a remote desktop session the rdesktop command. A typical SSH command will look like:

while true; do ssh 10.0.0.221 && break; sleep 1; done

This will simply keep trying the ssh command until a connection has been established. As soon as a connection was successful I will receive a shell, which when exited from will break the loop and return me to my local command prompt.

Automatically Running a Command

If you had to run some command the moment you are able to do so, you could use the above SSH command with some minor modifications.

Lets say you wanted to remove the file /opt/repository.lock as soon as possible. To keep it simple we’re assuming the user you log in as has permission to do so.

The basic idea is that each time you fail to connect, SSH will return a non-zero status. As soon as you connect and run the command you will break out of the loop. In order to do so, we need a zero exit status to distinguish between a failed and successful connect.

The exit status during a successful connect, however, will depend on the command being run on the other end of the connection. If it fails for some reason, you don’t want SSH to repeatedly try and fail, effectively ending up in a loop that won’t exit by itself. So you need to ensure it’s exit status is 0, whether it fails or not. You can handle the failure manually.

This can be achieved by executing the true command after the rm command. All the true command does is to immediately exit with a zero (success) exit status. It’s the same command we use to create an infinite while loop in all these examples.

The resulting command is as follows:

while true; do \
  ssh 10.0.0.221 "rm -f /opt/repository.lock ; true" && break; \
  sleep 1; \
done

This will create an infinite while loop and execute the ssh and sleep commands. As soon as a SSH connection is established, it will remove the /opt/repository.lock file and run the true command, which will return a 0 status. The SSH instance will exit with success status, which will cause a break from the while loop and end the command, returning back to the command prompt. As with all the previous examples, when the connection fails the loop will pause for a second, and then try again.

Conclusion

By using these commands instead of repeatedly trying to connect yourself, there is a max of 1 second from the time the service started till when you’re connected. This can be very useful in emergency situations where every second you have some problem could cost you money or reputation.

The Linux terminal is a powerful place and I sometimes wonder if those who designed the Unix terminal knew what they were creating and how powerful it would become.

So Why Love Linux? Because the Linux terminal allows you to optimize your tasks beyond humanly capability.