I’m having some fun at the minute with a dodgy internet connection. It really is driving me to distraction, I must admit. It’s quite frustrating.

It manifests as a connection that drops in and out almost at random. In fact, if I heavily load the connection, rather than doing what I expect and dropping out, it seems to stabilise. But I can’t really download hundreds of GB all the time, can I? Also, it does likewise drop out occasionally at high loads – that’s the worst issue anyone has to try to troubleshoot: an intermittent one.

Regardless, I’m trying to collect evidence for the flakiness (although tonight it doesn’t seem to be playing – I’ve had a largely painless experience online this evening) so need some way of proving that something is up.

Note that I’m in Windows 10 most evenings, due to Skype, Word and Visual Studio. Yup, spend all day at work on Linux, move to Windows of an evening. Insert moaning about no good Office suites on Linux here.

So, anyway, a quick Windows (non-Powershell) script to ping a site at regular intervals, and log if not successful. Right now I’m not interested in when it is working – only when it’s not.

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set hostIP=[put an IP address here]
:loop
set pingline=1
for /f "delims=" %%A in ('ping -n 1 -w 250 -l 255 %hostIP%') do (
    if !pingline! equ 2 (
        set logline=!date! !time! "%%A"
        echo !logline! | find "TTL=">nul || echo !logline! >> pinglog.txt
        )
    set /a pingline+=1
    )
timeout 10
goto loop

All credit due, I found this here and modified slightly so I didn’t have to download something from Windows Server 2003. OK, so timeout is slightly less accurate than sleep, but for my purposes it is sufficient. It will run until you kill it. Closing the command line is sufficient.