In this blog post, I will show you how to use PowerShell 7 to ping and check host availability with advanced features.
Test-Connection
Back in the early days of Windows PowerShell, Microsoft released the test-connection cmdlet which is similar to the ping command line.
With the release of PowerShell 7, the test-connection cmdlet has received a few new features that make it much better than using the simple ping command.
Features
The test-connection cmdlet giving us the following features:
- IPv4 or IPv6 test
- Repat of ping without stopping after 4 attempts
- Traceroute option built into the cmdlet as a switch
- Timeout
- TCP port option
- Show source and destination
Demo
To run a simple ping test we use the following cmdlet
test-connection www.ntweekly.com -ipv4
To continue pinging the host I will add the repeat switch
test-connection www.ntweekly.com -ipv4 -repeat
To test if a port is open I will use
test-connection www.ntweekly.com -tcpport 443
To run a traceroute at the same time I will use
Test-Connection www.ntweekly.com -Traceroute -IPv4
To ping multiple servers at the same time, I will use
Test-Connection www.ntweekly.com, www.google.com