I’ve been working on a PowerShell script to automatically power up and shut down all devices in my home lab. Both in the interest of saving on hydro and to reduce it’s environmental impact. To do this, I’ve been using a low-power Raspberry Pi 3 B+, which will stay powered on to orchestrate these and other scripted activities.
One great PowerShell cmdlet that comes in handy is Test-Connection. Although it can be used for numerous network testing purposes, it’s most commonly used to send an ICMP echo request to a host to see if it responds or not. The cmdlet responds with a simple true or false response, which makes it very handy for scripting purposes. I was really hoping to use this cmdlet because it makes it easy to determine if a device is still online or not and if it’s okay to move on to the next phase of powering things on or shutting things down. For example, I don’t want to power on my management ESXi host until the freenas SAN is online.
The problem I ran into was that not all PowerShell cmdlets have been ported over to PowerShell Core for Linux. Test-Connection is unfortunately one of them due to the way it uses the Microsoft Windows network stack to function. Looking at the GitHub PR, it seems they are getting close to porting it over, but I decided to try my hand at creating a python script with similar basic functionality.
I should note that I’m not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination and it’s been many years since I’ve done any serious coding. This is actually the first bit of python code I’ve written, so I’m sure there are many more efficient ways to achieve what I’ve done here:
import os
import sys
# If no arguments parsed, display the greeting:
if len(sys.argv) == 1:
print("vswitchzero.com ICMP response script. Specify up to 3 hosts to ping separated by spaces.")
print("example: python ./pinghost.py 172.16.10.15 192.168.1.1 vc.lab.local")
# If one arg parsed, ping a single host
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
host1 = sys.argv[1]
response = os.system("ping -c 1 " + host1 + "> /dev/null")
if response == 0:
print host1, 'is responding'
else:
print host1, 'is not responding'
# If two args parsed, ping two hosts
if len(sys.argv) == 3:
host1 = sys.argv[1]
host2 = sys.argv[2]
response1 = os.system("ping -c 1 " + host1 + "> /dev/null")
if response1 == 0:
print host1, 'is responding'
else:
print host1, 'is not responding'
response2 = os.system("ping -c 1 " + host2 + "> /dev/null")
if response2 == 0:
print host2, 'is responding'
else:
print host2, 'is not responding'
# If three args parsed, ping three hosts
if len(sys.argv) == 4:
host1 = sys.argv[1]
host2 = sys.argv[2]
host3 = sys.argv[3]
response1 = os.system("ping -c 1 " + host1 + "> /dev/null")
if response1 == 0:
print host1, 'is responding'
else:
print host1, 'is not responding'
response2 = os.system("ping -c 1 " + host2 + "> /dev/null")
if response2 == 0:
print host2, 'is responding'
else:
print host2, 'is not responding'
response3 = os.system("ping -c 1 " + host3 + "> /dev/null")
if response3 == 0:
print host3, 'is responding'
else:
print host3, 'is not responding'
# If more than three args parsed, display an error
if len(sys.argv) > 4:
print('vswitchzero.com ICMP response script. Specify up to 3 hosts to ping separated by spaces.')
print('example: python ./pinghost.py 172.16.10.15 192.168.1.1 vc.lab.local')
print(' ')
print('ERROR: Too many arguments specified. Use 1-3 IPs or hostnames only. Each should be separated by a space')
Continue reading “Creating a Python Replacement for the Test-Connection cmdlet.”
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