When writing your own monitoring and troubleshooting scripts, you need a way to verify that remote systems are online and responding. This can be useful when building a script that needs to poll servers on a regular basis, or to do a routine check within a script to verify that a server is online before invoking one or more commands. In this recipe, we'll take a look at how you can use the shell to verify connectivity of remote servers.
To verify that a remote system is available, use the
Test-Connection
cmdlet:Test-Connection -ComputerName mbx1
The
-ComputerName
parameter accepts an array of arguments, so you can test multiple systems at once by specifying multiple server names separated by a comma:Test-Connection -ComputerName mbx1,mbx2
Like the ping command, the cmdlet will send four echo requests to the remote host by default. You can override this using the
-Count
parameter:To verify that all of...