NetPing
Jeff Key
January 24, 2003
Updated April 25, 2007 

NetPing (and source) is now hosted on CodePlex in two sites: one for NetPing itself, and another for AddIns. The rest of this page is retained for historical record. Thanks for visiting!

<24Jan2003>I recently got myself into a situation where I was away from the office on the VPN and, changed a machine's IP address, rebooted it and realized I forgot to note the new address.  Since the only access I had to the machine was via Remote Desktop over the VPN, I was in a sticky situation.  Rather than ping all 255 addresses on our subnet to figure out what its new address was, I wrote this little util.</24Jan2003>

How times have changed!

Thanks to several good folks, Adam Cogan and Scott Hanselman in particular, NetPing has grown into quite a beast. 

Here is the current feature set:

  • Pings range of ip addresses.
  • Two types of AddIns supported: Column and Action.

Column AddIns included:

  • Operating System
  • Uptime
  • Processor info
  • Memory info: Total/free physical and virtual
  • Free space available on Windows drive

Action AddIns included (these actions can be performed on any of the hosts listsed):

  • Hard drive info:  Drives, total and free space
  • Lanch Windows Computer Management
  • Monitor when status changes:  Informs you when an offline host comes online or when an online host goes offline
  • Open with Remote Desktop
  • Reboot
  • Scan ports
  • Send message
  • View and open shares
  • View an HTML version of systeminfo.exe

Please feel free to write your own addins.  The source for the addins above can be downloaded here. 

Changes in v2.2:

  • Can now enable/disable addins 
  • Can now order columns 
  • Saving all column widths (including addins)
  • Added list of local computer's addresses (Tools|My Address)
  • Added memory (total/free/virtTotal/virtFree) (adam)
  • Fixed ReponseTime sorting
  • Moved options to Tools|Options
  • Changed Notes to an addin
  • Changed ResponseTime to an addin
  • Changed Host Name to an addin
  • Changed Manage to addin
  • Changed ping to work a little faster

Changes in v2.0:

  • Built against v1.1 of the .NET Framework.
  • Added simple AddIn support.
    • To create a custom AddIn, see the included AddInSource zip.  Email me if you have any questions.
  • Moved most host-related features (things off the host context menu) out to an AddIn project, the source of which is included.
  • Can now optionally connect to the console session of a host via Remote Desktop.  (Only works for XP and later.)
  • If the hostname is available, it is used to open things such as Remote Desktop, instead of the IP address.  (Having multiple windows open with IP addresses gets confusing.)
  • Can now select multiple hosts and perform a subset of the actions no them as a group.  (This is determined by the AddIn.)
  • Added ResponseTime column.
  • Added Beep When Done Pinging column.
  • Removed Max Threads option, since there was really no benefit to setting it to anything other than the max of 25.
  • New AddIns:
    • Reboot (remote reboot of host)
    • Send Message (uses net send to send a message)
    • Hard Drive Info (launches instance of NetworkDriveInfo for that machine)
    • Shares (displays a list of shares for the machine, which can be opened)
  • Window size and column widths are persisted between sessions.
  • Other stuff I've forgotten.

Changes in v1.1:

  • Added multithreaded pinging, which is much faster than the old version.  User can set number of threads used to 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25.
  • Added "monitoring" of availability.  User can set ping interval to 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 seconds.
  • Added optional listing of unavailable hosts.
  • Added persistence of start/end addresses.
  • Added icon, small icon and list view.
  • Added ability to connect to host with Remote Desktop.
  • Added ability to connect to host with Windows Computer Management.
  • Added ability to get host's system information via systeminfo.exe, which is presented in HTML.

Download (287k)  NOTE: NetPing requires the .NET Framework v1.1.  If you don't have it, download it from Windows Update.   Also, Ping functionality requires Windows XP or above.

v1 Source (131k)

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