TrayPing

TrayPing is a free host monitoring program for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 (and Windows 95 when Winsock2 is installed).  Its purpose is to periodically "ping" a remote host and provide a simple and unobtrusive way to report to you that the host is up or down.  It does this by placing a red heart icon  in the system tray if the host is up, and a dark blue icon  in the tray when the host is down.

TrayPing is smart enough to not waste too much network bandwidth.  It pings the host in one-second intervals until the host has responded five consecutive times, after which point TrayPing waits 30 seconds between updates.  When the host does not respond to one of those long interval updates, TrayPing then resumes pinging at one second intervals until it responds again or is down for five consecutive tries.

Here's a screen shot of TrayPing in action in the system tray.  It shows that the host being monitored, www.ncftp.com, has as its fastest response time of 47 milliseconds, an average response time of 134.8 ms, and a slowest response of 250 ms.  In addition, it shows that there has been no packet loss (0% pl).

Installation

Run the Setup.exe that you downloaded.  Technically, all that you need is the trayping.exe installed, but I have included an InstallShield so there is an easy and reliable way to completely uninstall the program and it's registry keys from your system.  Unfortunately the InstallShield setup makes the archive huge in comparison to the relatively small trayping.exe file it installs.
 

Configuration

After launching TrayPing, right click the tray icon's context menu and select the "Configure..." menu item (or wait a few seconds and if you haven't configured it yet, it'll pop up automatically).  Here's an example of what you might enter in the configuration dialog box:
 


The Refresh Interval field lets you fine-tune how often TrayPing polls the host, in seconds.  You can set this as low as 5 seconds, but to keep your CPU utilization (and the remote server's) to a minimum, consider leaving it at the default of 30 seconds. This interval is only applicable for the long interval it uses. Remember, TrayPing automatically goes into one-second intervals when the host state is in flux.
 

Advanced

TrayPing can now be run from the command line.  An example would be "trayspy.exe www.example.com 45", which would poll www.example.com with a refresh interval of 45 seconds.
 

Change Log

Download

Where I come from, a piece of code that didn't take longer than a month to do should be freeware, and not milk-the-public-ware.  In addition, you should get source code so you can see how it works if you're so inclined.  Therefore, in that grand UNIX tradition, since TrayPing is really a weekend hack, you can download and use TrayPing for free and have a look at the included source code if you want to.

Most people will not use the source code, but for those that do, please be aware that the source code is still protected by copyright, so don't steal the code and pretend you wrote it. You are allowed to modify it for personal use, but you can't post modified versions or include portions of the source code in other programs without my consent.

Frequently Asked Questions

    Q. How do I get TrayPing to poll more than one server?

    A. TrayPing was designed to allow multiple instances to run at the same time, so just run the trayping.exe again (and again...) to get additional configuration sets.

    Q.Does it work with regular Windows 95?

    A. TrayPing requires that Winsock version 2 be installed.  Older installations of Windows 95 do not come with Winsock2.  You can download and install that from Microsoft if you like.

    Q. Do I have to pay for TrayPing?

    A. No, it is free!

    Q. Who wrote it?

    A. Mike Gleason of NcFTP Software.

    Q. Is their official support for it?

    A. No.

    Q. I'm running multiple TrayPings, but how can I tell which one is which on the system tray?

    A. Linger your mouse pointer over the tray icon, which brings up the tooltip that tells you the server status.
     


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Please do not send mail to hunnypot@ncftpd.com . You will be permanently black-listed if you send mail to that address.