This article presents a simple way to ping an address and get the results of the ping using ASP. The idea was supplied by Bart Silverstein.
First, a .BAT file needs to be created that will be run from the Active Server Page. Let's call this file DoPing.BAT. It will contain only one statement, which will ping a passed in IP address. Here is the code for DoPing.BAT:
ping -a %1 > d:\INetPub\cgi-bin\%2.txt
This will, if you can't tell, ping the address passed in as the first command line argument (%1), and redirect the results to a text file named hy the second command line argument (%2). Now, let's look how we would call this from an ASP file:
<%
Set FileSys = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
FileName = FileSys.GetTempName
Set WShShell = Server.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
IP = "204.123.54.1" ' or whatever you want to ping
RetCode = WShShell.Run("d:\Inetpub\cgi-bin\DoPing.bat " & IP & " " & FileName, 1, True)
if RetCode = 0 Then
'There were no errors
else
Response.Redirect "PingErrors.htm"
end if
Set TextFile = FileSys.OpenTextFile("d:\InetPub\cgi-bin\" & FileName & ".txt", 1)
TextBuffer = TextFile.ReadAll
For i = 1 to Len(TextBuffer)
If Mid(TextBuffer,i,1) = chr(13) Then
Response.Write("<BR>")
else
Response.Write(Mid(TextBuffer,i,1))
end if
Next
TextFile.Close
FileSys.DeleteFile "d:\Inetpub\cgi-bin\" & FileName & ".txt"
%>
Before you go hog wild and implement this code or use similar techniques on your site, there are a few things you should be wary of. From a secutiry standpoint, this is really dangerous, for any time you let someone run an application on your server there is always the potential that it will come back to haunt you. One suggestion to lessen the threat: make a separate folder with no script or execute priviledges, and have your DoPing.bat output its results to that folder.
I hope this article was informative an interesting. Happy Programming!