Test-Connection oddities

I’ve playing around with Test-Connection because I wanted to set up a long running WMI based job and I thought that pinging a machine lots of times would be a good way to do it. Test-Connection uses the Win32-PingStatus class.

I started with this

PS> Test-Connection -ComputerName . -Count 4

Source        Destination     IPV4Address   IPV6Address  Bytes    Time(ms)
——        ———–     ———–   ———–  —–    ——–
RSLAPTOP01    localhost       127.0.0.1        ::1          32       0
RSLAPTOP01    localhost       127.0.0.1        ::1          32       0
RSLAPTOP01    localhost       127.0.0.1        ::1          32       0
RSLAPTOP01    localhost       127.0.0.1        ::1          32       0

Nothing special there.

I then tried this

PS> Test-Connection -ComputerName . -Count 4 -Quiet
False

Huh?

PS> Test-Connection -ComputerName localhost -Count 4 -Quiet
True

Odd

PS> Test-Connection -ComputerName $env:COMPUTERNAME -Count 4 -Quiet
True

Very odd – seems like “.” isn’t liked when running –Quiet.  Another good reason to avoid it

I then tried it as a job

PS> Test-Connection -ComputerName . -Count 4 -AsJob

Id       Name     State      HasMoreData   Location     Command
–       —-     —–      ———–   ——–     ——-
3        Job3     Running    False         .            Test-Connection

PS> Get-Job

Id       Name     State      HasMoreData   Location     Command
–       —-     —–      ———–   ——–     ——-
1        Job1     Completed  True          .            Test-Connection
3        Job3     Completed  True          .            Test-Connection

PS> Receive-Job -Id 3

Source   Destination  IPV4Address  IPV6Address  Bytes    Time(ms)
——   ———–  ———–  ———–  —–    ——–
RSLAPTOP01 localhost    127.0.0.1        ::1       32       0

Only one ping is returned instead of the 4 I was expecting.

Not major problems but something to remember