How To Check If Servers In DMZ Are Up and Running Or Pinging?

By Nirmal Sharma / August 24, 2008

The servers in DMZ are protected by the firewall. The firewall rules are used to block any incoming traffic such as ICMP. ICMP is used by the Ping utility. So you can not ping a server from your desktop.

Scenario: You have a desktop computer which is out of DMZ. You have a task assigned to you which involves pinging all the servers in the DMZ to make sure they are up and running. As a manual process, you will log on to a server (generally called a Management Server) in DMZ and then check all the servers one by one or run a Ping Script which will show you the results in a text file. What if you want to check the connectivity from the Desktop computer? In this situation, you can use a simple command to process the Ping from within the DMZ's Management Server. This is how you do it:

Steps:

Create a text file by name ServersDMZ.txt
Copy all the server names in the text you created and then save it.
Run the following command from your "desktop" on a Server in DMZ from which all other servers in the DMZ are reachable.

For /f "Tokens=*" %a in (ServersDMZ.txt) do Psexec.exe \\ManagementServer Ping %a > Results.txt

The above command will run on a Management Server running in the DMZ and then check the connectivity of all the Servers specified in the ServersDMZ.txt.

About The Author

Nirmal Sharma

Nirmal Sharma is a MCSEx3, MCITP and was awarded the Microsoft MVP award in Directory Services and Windows Networking. He specializes in Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Directory Services, Failover Clusters, Hyper-V, PowerShell Scripting and System Center products. Nirmal has been involved with Microsoft Technologies since 1994. In his spare time, he likes to help others and share some of his knowledge by writing tips and articles on various sites.