Network troubleshooting: telnet alternative command

telnet is a useful tool for trouble-shooting whether its possible to connect to a remote server listening on a particular port. But what happens when your host doesn’t support the telnet command? nc article here

-- nc -zv <host> 80
nc -zv www.google.com 80

-- results
Connection to www.google.com 80 port [tcp/http] succeeded!

This happened at work, when our buildkite agents didn’t have telnet installed but had nc. We were trouble-shooting a network issue and it was critical to determine whether we could connect out vs the listener service being blocked.