VBscript: "Pinging" a computer.

If you looked at yesterday’s post, carefully I’ll admit as WordPress loves to mangle the display of <CODE>; you might have noticed that I check to see if a computer is on the network, before I try and do something to it.
The reason is simple.
Checking that a computer is on the network, is faster, than just trying to copy a file to it, and checking for a failure. I don’t know why, but I suspect a “Ping” is faster than a file operation.
Here is some (crude) code I wrote the other day, which shows a ping in use:

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
If not objFSO.FileExists("C:\computer_lists\file_targets.txt") Then WScript.Quit(99) End If
Set ObjStream = objFSO.OpenTextFile("C:\computer_lists\file_targets.txt",1)
file_destination = ""
Do While Not ObjStream.AtEndOfStream strComputer = ObjStream.ReadLine If strComputer = "" Then WScript.Quit End If

If Reachable(strComputer) Then file_destination = "\\" + strComputer + "\c$\pluckaduck\raffle.exe"
On Error Resume Next objFSO.CopyFile "c:\pluckaduck\raffle.exe",file_destination,True If Err.Number <> 0 Then WScript.echo strComputer + " - failed copy" Else WScript.Echo strComputer End If

On Error GoTo 0 Else WScript.Echo "Computer is Unreachable!" End If
Loop
WScript.Quit
Function Reachable(strComputer) ' On Error Resume Next Dim wmiQuery, objWMIService, objPing, objStatus wmiQuery = "Select * From Win32_PingStatus Where Address = '" & strComputer & "'" Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2") Set objPing = objWMIService.ExecQuery(wmiQuery)

For Each objStatus In objPing If IsNull(objStatus.StatusCode) Or objStatus.Statuscode<>0 Then Reachable = False 'if computer is unreacable, return false Else Reachable = True 'if computer is reachable, return true End If Next End Function

I found the code for the Reachable Function here.

Update Sept 2010: there is a new version of the Reachable function here.

VBscript: "Pinging" a computer.

Related posts: