Creating Highspeed Ping (Part 3)

by Feb 19, 2018

In the previous tip we illustrated how WMI can ping multiple computers in a very fast way. However, the syntax was awkward. So let’s rewrite the code to make it easier to specify the list of computers you want to ping:

# ping the specified servers with a given timeout (milliseconds)
$ComputerName = 'google.de','microsoft.com','r13-c00'
$TimeoutMillisec = 1000
 
# convert list of computers into a WMI query string
$query = $ComputerName -join "' or Address='"
 
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_PingStatus -Filter "(Address='$query') and timeout=$TimeoutMillisec" | Select-Object -Property Address, StatusCode

Now it’s really easy to ping even large numbers of computers: just add them to $ComputerName which is a string array. You can also use Get-Content to fill $ComputerName, provided you read a file with one computer name per line.

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