monitoring

Pinging a remote computer from another remote computer using the WMI Win32_PingStatus class in VBScript

I recently began working on trying to figure out ways to troubleshoot real problems with a VBScript and give me some diagnostic information about the current state of the environment. As I build this script I plan on sharing pieces of it bit by bit with you, my readers. I also wanted to get back to writing some WMI scripts that will help you all do your jobs more efficiently. Lastly, I wanted to begin building a “toolbox” script that you could use to write your own scripts. These are the goals I’m tracking toward in my next series of posts that contain VBScript code. Now onto this script…

The first piece of troubleshooting a problem, in my opinion, is ensuring that a communication path exists between two systems. Duh! However, simply pinging the systems individually from your desktop isn’t a good test… it only tests the your computer can communicate with the two systems, not that they can communicate with each other!

This script simply uses our friend WMI to make a call a remote computer requesting that computer ping another computer. Simple enough, but invaluable because how many times have you had to login to a remote computer to check if it can connect to a system? Now you don’t have to… you can do it from a script!

The script uses the Win32_PingStatus class in WMI. Essentially, it will only work on Windows XP and newer (Sorry, Windows 2000 and older doesn’t support the WMI class we need.) and the user executing the script will likely need to be an administrator on the system that is being called (but not necessarily being pinged). For further information on this class you can reference the Win32_PingStatus documentation.

Now lets get to the script!

 ‘Use a remote computer to ping another remote computer
Option Explicit 
‘Change the SourceServer and RemoteServer Strings below to servernames or IP addresses for you.
wscript.Echo RemotePing(”SourceServer”, “RemoteServer”)
wscript.Echo “Done!”

Function RemotePing( SourceComputer, DestinationComputer)

 Dim strComputer1, strComputer2
 Dim objWMIService, colItems, objItem

 strComputer1 = SourceComputer
 strComputer2 = DestinationComputer

 On Error Resume Next
  ’ error control block
  Set objWMIService = GetObject(”winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}//” & strComputer1 & “\root\cimv2″)
  Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery (”Select * from Win32_PingStatus ” & “Where Address = ‘” & strComputer2 & “‘”)
  For Each objItem in colItems
      If objItem.StatusCode = 0 Then
          RemotePing = strComputer1& “: Reply received from ” & strComputer2 & ” in ” & objItem.ResponseTime & ” ms.”         
      Else
       RemotePing = “Error pinging ” & strComputer2 & ” from ” & strComputer1 & “. The status code returned was :” & objItem.StatusCode
      End If
  Next
 On Error GoTo 0
End function

As always, this code works perfectly. However, sometimes the formatting of the blog breaks the code if you copy and paste it into your editor. So, if you’d like to not type or troubleshoot any syntax errors due to the copy and paste problems– I’ve provided the code for download, plus example output files  from my final tests for you. You’ll find the code and other files available for download from my website’s (www.websystemsadministration.com) File Depot under the ITKE Blog Scripts category. Enjoy and happy scripting!

How to associate specific WWW w3wp.exe process ID’s with a IIS application

One of the most difficult problems with troubleshooting a web application on a server that has many applications on it is determining which one of the applications is causing an issue. Sometimes that is easy because you see an error message or, in those rare cases where you get an actual screenshot, a URL is given to you to go on. However, often you don’t get such useful information! Most times you just notice a w3wp.exe process either taking up to much memory or using to many CPU cycles (or in some cases none at all), but there’s a vbscript solution for this!

The best part is that you don’t have to write a single line of VBScript code! It’s already been written for you my Microsoft! The only thing you need to do is be sure the applications have a different pool name from one another—which is always a good idea.At a command prompt you can run iisapp.vbs to get application pool information associated with a specific w3wp.exe process, like so:cscript c:\WINDOWS\system32\iisapp.vbsThis will return output similar to the following:

W3WP.exe PID: 17632   AppPoolId: Application-1
W3WP.exe PID: 17532   AppPoolId: Application-2
W3WP.exe PID: 5748   AppPoolId: Application-2
W3WP.exe PID: 14040   AppPoolId: Application-1

That’s it… easy as pie!