I’m having awful trouble with my DSL here at work; there are sporadic periods when the connection keeps dropping, but whenever an engineer comes to look at it, it fails to misbehave.
What I need to do is set up a machine to ping somewhere like Google, just once a minute and write a single line result to a text file. Hopefully a pattern of failure will emerge and I can schedule an appointment for the next engineer visit to occur during a likely episode of connection loss.
If I had a Linux machine up and running at the moment, I could do this with a single command; if I had the time, I could write a little VB app that would do it for me, but I have neither. So I’m looking for a little off-the-shelf bit of freeware to do it. Can find loads of them that will graphically display what’s going on, but so far, nothing that will produce a simple text log.
Thanks; as far as I can tell, the Windows Ping command doesn’t have the necessary functionality to do the job; it can be set to ping repeatedly, but the interval between pings is not (AFAIK) adjustable. Since I’ve got to leave it running for a number of days, it isn’t going to work.
Could a Linux live CD perform the task on an otherwise minimally used machine? I don’t know how, just a thought that crossed my mind. Mind pointing me at a link with instructions if this will work?
I have a couple of customers experiencing similar problems that I am having a bear of a time pinning down. What ISP is handling your lines?
I’m beginning to wonder if in the recent price drop of AT&T’s DSL service they have overwhelmed their capacity a bit and are dropping and or taking 5-10 min sometimes to recognize a new connection.
You could tell Windows to run a batch file once every hour, comprised of the following line (the “>>” appends the output to all previous output):
ping www.google.com >> pinglog.txt
You’d have to go to Task Scheduler, create an entry, clone it 23 times (once for each hour of the day) and then manually tweak them to run each hour. I’m pretty sure this is as close as WinXP gets to allowing you to run cron jobs. Obviously you can set as many flags as you like.
The text logging feature is accessed by R clicking on the address that is being pinged and clicking more detail. Couldn’t find an explanation for that in the FAQ/help files. I just tested it against my site and was able to save a regular text log file.
I slapped together a little app using TCL and freewrap unzip it to c:\ the ini file has settings for the domain to ping, the interval and duration it writes a timestamped log file to its directory (C:\PingLogger)
