Using Rust to test telnet connection and log results - windows

Question

I am a Rust newbie. I've been wanting to learn Rust and decided my first project would be to build a connection testing tool packaged an executable for the tech support people at my work. Basically the tool needs to run by end-users on Windows computers and test three or more URLs using ping, tracert, and telnet. Also after running the tool, the results of the three commands should be logged into text files and lastly enclosed in a zip file at the end.
I put some code together and it's mostly working except for the telnet portion. I've been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why the telnet part is not working. I was able to compile my Rust code successfully and it runs, but no matter what the telnet part generates a telnet connection failed in the log indicating the telnet was not successful, even though I am able to run the telnet command on the same machine using the same command manually typed (telnet service1.somedomain.com 13101). So I can see telnet is installed and working...
Further down below is my code. I added some println! statements on lines 59-61 and the only clue I see so far is the status code that prints out when I run the tool says telnet command exited with status: exit code: 0xffffffff and nothing prints for telnet stdout/stderr. This seems to indicate telnet is aborting or not found, so I used the full path to the telnet.exe file on the Windows machine (C:\Windows\System32\telnet.exe) instead of just "telnet" and still got the same error.
use std::process::Command;
use std::fs::File;
use std::io::prelude::*;
use std::io::Error;
use std::path::{Path, PathBuf};
use std::io::Cursor;
//use zip::write::FileOptions;
//use zip::result::ZipWriter;
use zip::write::{FileOptions, ZipWriter};
use zip::result::ZipResult;
fn main() -> Result<(), Error> {
// Set the domains and ports to be tested
let domains_and_ports = [
("www.somedomain.com", "80"),
("serivce1.somedomain.com", "13101"),
("service2.somedomain.com", "13103")];
// Create a zip file to store the results
let zip_file_path = Path::new("results.zip");
let zip_file = File::create(zip_file_path)?;
let mut zip_writer = ZipWriter::new(zip_file);
// Set the password to encrypt the zip file
let password = b"password";
// Iterate over each domain and port combination
for (domain, port) in domains_and_ports {
// Run the ping command
let ping_output = Command::new("cmd")
.args(&["/C", format!("ping {}", domain).as_str()])
.output()?;
let ping_file_path = write_output_to_file(domain, "ping.txt", &ping_output)?;
// Run the tracert command
let tracert_output = Command::new("cmd")
.args(&["/C", format!("tracert {}", domain).as_str()])
.output()?;
let tracert_file_path = write_output_to_file(domain, "tracert.txt", &tracert_output)?;
let telnet_output = Command::new("cmd")
.args(&["/C", format!("telnet {} {}", domain, port).as_str()])
.output()?;
let telnet_file_path = write_output_to_file(domain, "telnet.txt", &telnet_output)?;
// Write the ping, tracert, and telnet results to the zip file
zip_writer.start_file(format!("{}_ping.txt", domain), FileOptions::default())?;
zip_writer.write_all(&read_file_contents(ping_file_path)?)?;
zip_writer.start_file(format!("{}_tracert.txt", domain), FileOptions::default())?;
zip_writer.write_all(&read_file_contents(tracert_file_path)?)?;
zip_writer.start_file(format!("{}_telnet.txt", domain), FileOptions::default())?;
println!("telnet command exited with status: {}", telnet_output.status);
println!("telnet stdout: {}", String::from_utf8_lossy(&telnet_output.stdout));
println!("telnet stderr: {}", String::from_utf8_lossy(&telnet_output.stderr));
if telnet_output.status.success() {
zip_writer.write_all(b"telnet connection successful")?;
} else {
zip_writer.write_all(b"telnet connection failed")?;
}
}
// Close the zip file
zip_writer.finish()?;
println!("Results saved in results.zip");
Ok(())
}
fn write_output_to_file(domain: &str, command: &str, output: &std::process::Output) -> Result<PathBuf, Error> {
let fname = format!("{}_{}", domain, command).as_str().to_owned();
//let file_path = Path::new(format!("{}_{}", domain, command).as_str());
let file_path = Path::new(&fname);
let mut file = File::create(file_path)?;
file.write_all(&output.stdout)?;
file.write_all(&output.stderr)?;
Ok(file_path.to_path_buf())
}
fn read_file_contents(file_path: PathBuf) -> Result<Vec<u8>, Error> {
let mut file = File::open(file_path)?;
let mut contents = Vec::new();
file.read_to_end(&mut contents)?;
Ok(contents)
}
This is what prints (one set shown for first domain, but it prints three sets with same error, for each domain/port combination)...
Does anyone have experience running telnet commands on Windows, plus logging telnet results using Rust? If anyone has tips or example code to fix my example above I would be truly grateful. As a side-note, I know something similar could be done with a Windows batch file or Python but I was really wanting to get the Rust project working so I could have a little "win" with this my first go around with it.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!
PS - the domains and ports are made-up for this post :).