How to get the ping of webstie in director mx

Question

Hi Guys.....
Today my task in director to detect the net
connection.........
I m uploading some asp file and database at the particular
website........
i m going to make the registration system ....user must be
register from the internet...
so when user run my application then first it will check the
internet connection..(some people say to me u hve to get the ping
of the particular website)...
so tell me how i will detect the internet connection..if
active or not..
if not then user must have the msgbox..plz connect ur net
i don't want to detect network connection i want to detect
the net connection...
plz reply me fast how to detect the internet connection from
the director mx....
plz.....

Answer 1

I’ve used Valentin Schmidt’s Shell Xtra (
http://staff.dasdeck.de/valentin/xtras/shell/)
to execute pings from Director to keep a VPN connection alive. I
think ping is used as a specific example in his “read
me” document. The xtra can execute either synchronously or
asynchronously. Waiting for a synchronous response is much easier
from a programming standpoint but it’s a fairly bad approach
for your users, working out the details for processing a net
operation asynchronously will provide a much better user experience
and as Mike said, all of the other net lingo operations are
asynchronous anyway.
That having been said, I’m not sure ping is really what
you need. Any number of things can go wrong when communicating with
a script on a remote server and you have to include significant
error handling for most of them. A ping will tell you that the
connection is alive and the server is responding to pings but
that’s all. I would just request the registration page from
the server and check netError() if the server fails to respond.
(you’re going to need that error handler even if the server
is responding to pings).
PS: I stumbled across the following article while looking for
something else but I think it might be relevant here. It describes
another method for using shell xtra to determine if an internet
connection is live. Frankly, I’m still not convinced all this
extra work is necessary, you’re still going to have to check
netError() if something goes wrong so you may as well use it from
the very start, however, if you really must know if the connection
is live before attempting communication here’s another
approach:
http://director-online.com/buildArticle.php?id=1148