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Terminal Server Ping Tool

Saturday, 14 June 2008 by Michel Roth

Just pinging a Terminal Server to see whether or not it's online is not always enough. Besides, the Terminal Server could be perfectly responsive to pings but not to actual Terminal Server sessions. This is why several products do a ping inside the RDP protocol to check for the status of the Terminal Service. Now there's a freebie tool for that as well. Remco Weijnen wrote a small tool that does a ping inside the RDP protocol to determine if the Terminal Service is responsive. He created this small freeware tool by making use of the undocumented API called WinStationServerPing.

So how does it work? Open up a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and type WTSPing /? to see the help:

WTSPing [/SERVER:servername] [-n count]

/SERVER:servername Specifies the Terminal server (default is current).
-n count Number of echo requests to send (default is 3).

If you just type WTSPing it will ping the local Terminal Server 3 times:

wtsping1

You can specify the number of pings with the -n parameter (eg -n 5). If you want to ping a remote server specify the server name with the /SERVER: parameter (eg /SERVER:MYSERVER).

Please note that Vista and Server 2008 do not support this API call from or to remote systems.

Download the tool at Remco Weijnen's site.