Programmatically Ping a Networked Device

I would say Ping is one of the most popular methods used to troubleshoot network issue. When a networked device or server goes down, one of the first things a network engineer or a system admininistrator do is try to ping it and see if it can be reached.

This blog will show you two ways to ping a device so you can integrate the ping feature into your own application.

The first and easiest way to issue a ping command is to call the Ping method in the My.Computer.Network class:

If my.Computer.Network.Ping("www.google.com") Then
MsgBox("device up")
Else
MsgBox("device down")
End If

The drawback of this method is that it only gives you a boolean as the result to indicate whether the device is up or down. It doesn’t provide any other details like RTT, TTL or any error code for that matter.

The second way is to call the Ping.Send() method in the System.Net.NetworkInformation namespace which returns a PingReply object through which you could get more detailed information about the ping reply:

Dim myPing As New System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping
Dim PR As System.Net.NetworkInformation.PingReply
PR = myPing.Send("www.yahoo.com")
If PR.Status = IPStatus.Success Then
MsgBox("Reply from " & PR.Address.ToString & ": BYTES=" & PR.Buffer.Length & " TIME<" & PR.RoundtripTime & "ms TTL=" & PR.Options.Ttl) Else MsgBox(PR.Status.ToString) End If

There you have it. Two ways of pinging a networked device. If you just need to check and see if a device is up or down, the first method might do just fine; however, if you need to gather some other statistics then obviously, the second one is the better choice.

I recommend that you read up on the PingReply object to get more information from the ping reply. If you wanted to implement some sort of Ping functionality as in Pinkie's then that's the way to go.

About Brian Dao

I am a former United States Paratrooper; served in the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division back in the 90's. I've been working in the IT field for over 10 years and have had various positions to include database & server administration, web/desktop application programming and network admin. My current job is to keep the bits from falling out of the switches at Hewlett Packard. Pinkie is a software that I designed and programmed in the wee hours. It's been in the works for over three years during which time, plenty of skittles and cokes have been consumed.

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