RE: Ping to a specific port

>I know there is some way to test ports between systems without using
>telnet (not allowed in my environment).  My monitoring (Messenger
>Console) does it but I can't figure out how.

There's only one way that I'm aware of to know if a connection is possible
between two given addresses on a particular port: try to make the
connection.  

>Is there a way to ping to a specific port? 

PING itself works because there is a standard service on a well known port
(ECHO). You send
a packet, it sends it back. So you can send packets to any port you want,
but unless they 
are attached to an ECHO server, they aren't ever coming back, and PING will
just say that 
it 'Timed out'. (Or if the connection is refused by a firewall, it might say
'unable to reach host')