Using telnet, you can make an educated guess whether a port on a remote host is open, closed or blocked by a firewall by the error message it throws. If you get no error message, the port is open. If you get an error like the following: Unable to connect to remote host: No route to host you are almost certainly seeing a blocked (by firewall or whatever) port. If you get an error like the following: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out the port is almost certainly a closed port.
