en Passant not letting life just pass on by

Working on network workstations, I found I needed a method to tell when they came online. I wanted a script to email me so I could receive it on my PDA when the connection worked. This way I could be working in the wiring cabinet and hear it successfully connect.

When you are looking for something, like a piece of hardware, and you don't know where to start looking, it is always useful to have a good set of tools.

For example, I wanted to find what IP address that a new UPS device was using. I could not locate it in the DHCP tables and figured it must have a static IP address. The administration tools could not access it via the USB cable, so I needed to brute force search for the IP address. What I would do for an IP scanner right then? Code one!

Working on servers, you inveriably need to reboot them. One of the primary tools I use to determine if a server has shut down is to PING the server.

PING servername -t


This will PING the server repeatedly until I quit it. When the server goes down, it will return "Request Timed Out" instead of a valid PING response. Here is what it would look like when the server shuts down, then comes back up again.