Quickly detect if a remote computer is on

[Tofu4679]

I've been doing the following:

If ping($ComputerName,5) > 0 Then
    ;Computer is on
EndIf

But this method is pretty slow, even with the timeout set to 5ms. I'm wondering if anyone else has a better, faster method for detecting if a remote computer is powered on?

[martin]

I've been doing the following:

If ping($ComputerName,5) > 0 Then
    ;Computer is on
EndIf

But this method is pretty slow, even with the timeout set to 5ms. I'm wondering if anyone else has a better, faster method for detecting if a remote computer is powered on?

If it's slow because you frequently check then maybe my udf will help because it runs another task to check that an ip is available, and it can do any combination of

set a flag for the state of connection,

set an icon for ON or OFF

call an 'event' function when the state of connection of an ip changes.

It was designed for checking lots of ips (I know someone uses it for more than 30) without slowing the main script, but even one ip would have a time saving.

See my sig.

[gcue]

yep works great! definitely check it out.

(see martin's signature - IsConnected2)

martin: glad you put in that fix for 2.8 =)

[Tofu4679]

Thanks I'll definitely take a look.

What bothers me is that if I ping a machine that is on the network the response time is between 3 and 5 ms, but if I ping a machine that is off it takes around 500ms, even though I have the timeout on the ping set to 10ms. It seems the timeout isn't working correctly. Ping is only slow when the machines are off. In my mind it should timeout after 10ms and move on but that isn't happening.