TCP Handshake Connection Tester

Designed mainly for developers and network administrators, the TCP Handshake Connection Tester provides a handy software tool that allows you to check that a TCP connection is successful, fast and complete. It verifies that the standard 3-way handshake in the established TCP connection is fulfilled, thus helping developers test the way an application handles this protocol.

There is no need to go through a setup process, as the application is portable. You simply have to double click on the executable file and it is ready to go but not before reading and accepting the product’s terms and legal notice. And since it is portable, you can launch it from a removable drive, without leaving traces behind on the host machine.

The one-window interface displays all the features, no additional menus are available. TCP Handshake Connection Tester displays a few fields that you must fill in to begin analyzing the TCP connection. To be more specific, you are required to enter the IP address of the target host and the target TCP port number. How everything works from this point on is described below.

Once you connect to the target host, you can then return the list of the network interfaces with unicast IP addresses that establish a TCP connection on the selected port number with the target IP address. The application checks that the 3-way handshake is completed for each connection.

TCP Handshake Connection Tester first checks if the target host is reachable over the IP version used by the network interface. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported. If the host is accessible, it proceeds to measuring the time elapsed for this initial connection to be complete and returns the value it gets. This allows developers and administrators to better assess an application’s capability to handle TCP connections, as an alternative to pinging the target host to obtain the ICMP response time.

Moreover, network managers can use this application to check connections for errors related to the transmission of TCP data packets. TCP Handshake Connection Tester can display statistics related to the number of received, discarded and outgoing packets that contain errors.

TCP Handshake Connection Tester is easy to use but it requires prior networking experience to be able to understand its purpose and use it at its full potential. It can provide precious information to software developers and network administrators alike, allowing them to test TCP connections established by certain applications.