nsPing is a command-line utility that "pings" a Notes server using the NSPingServer API call and returns information about the availability of the server and the round-trip ping time. It's essentially a Notes version of the classic "ping" program for TCP/IP. Good to use with the /b and /t options to ping a server all day, so you know if it becomes non-responsive.

I usually have a DOS prompt open with this program running against one of my problem servers all day, with the options:

nsPing "serverName" /b /c /t /w:15

Then it starts flashing and beeping if the server goes down or stops responding. You can also pipe the output to a text file, if that's better for you -- just add a ">> outputFile.txt" at the end of the command line. For example:

nsPing "serverName" /c /t /w:15 >> pingstats.txt

As of version 1.3, there is also a /o option to send output to a text file as it's being displayed on the screen (piping the output doesn't let you see the ping results at the console as they're happening).

Requirements
Windows 95/98/NT/2000
Notes Client 4.5 or higher

Known Problems
Occasionally on one of my Windows 2000 machines, if nsPing has been running for a long time with the /t option, CTRL-C sometimes doesn't stop the program. No idea why or under what circumstances this happens. You can just close the DOS prompt window to kill the program in that case.

Also, if the server you're pinging goes down and comes back up in the middle of a long string of pings (like if you're using the /t option), you may be prompted for a login, even if you've previously logged in. This is a Notes authentication issue that is built in to the API.

download nsPing (20KB)