brsh/pingm

pingm - multiple ping tool

Sends continuous pings to computers, and draws an in-console view of the results

e.g.

Why not Test-NetConnection? Because that will send four pings to the first host, then four to the next host, etc. then exit. This will ping all hosts repeatedly in a loop.

Example

Ping a local gateway, an internet host, and a remote machine over a VPN so that when you reboot the router, you can confirm router, WAN links and VPNs all come online, without running three separate pings by hand.

PS D:\> .\pingm.ps1 192.168.0.1, google.com, 10.200.50.50

Example

Use it as a rudimentary ping sweep to ping the first 10 IPs in 192.168.1.0/24:

1..10 | foreach { "192.168.1.$_" } | .\pingm.ps1

Example

Keep lots of results, it wraps around the screen:

PS D:\> .\pingm.ps1 google.com, example.org -ResultCount 400

Example

Ping computers from Active Directory

PS D:\> Get-ADComputer -Filter "Name -like '*Server*'" | % Name | .\pingm.ps1

Notes

Takes one or more ComputerNames as a parameter, or from the pipeline - names or IPs. Sets up a continuous loop of ping tests, and draws the last few ping results on screen. e.g. for pinging several things as you reboot them, and watching them come back online.

Results key:

• _ represents no data, result slots start out like this before there are results for them
• . represents a ping reply
• x represents a timeout
• ? represents an exception during the ping attempt, or other failure

Press Ctrl-C to break the loop and stop it running.

NB. 'ping' requests are usually low priority for hosts to reply to, and often dropped if links are hitting bandwidth limits. A few blip timeouts when pinging over the internet is quite common, and you can't reliably use "one failure" to indicate a host is offline or has network problems.