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Jaakko Seppälä
Asked: 2015-12-09 13:28:49 +0800 CST

Can I detect on Ubuntu if Windows XP computer is on?

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I would like to measure how much a laptop with Windows XP can run on batteries. I have another computer with Xubuntu that I can use to measure if Windows XP computer is on. But how can I connect these two computers and how can I measure if Xubuntu can read data from Windows XP computer? Or should XP send some data to Xubuntu?

networking

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I think the easiest solution is using ICMP echo requests (ping). For this, you have to set up the XP box to respond to ICMP messages, as described here.

    Now, make sure the Linux and the XP machine are in the same network, and both have an IP address. You can check this on Linux with

    ifconfig

    and on Windows with

    ipconfig /all

    You'll need the XP IP address for the following script:

    #!/bin/bash
time (
    while [ true ]; do
        ping -c 1 "$1" > /dev/null || break
        sleep 60
    done
)

    Save this script in some file, e.g. pingtimer.sh and make it executable with chmod +x pingtimer.sh

    You can now start it with

    ./pingtimer.sh <target IP address>

    from within the same directory.

    Let's break this thing down:

    1. time () measures the time the command inside the () took to execute.
    2. while [true]; do ...; done repeats the inner command (...) infinitely or until interrupted or broken.
    3. ping -c 1 "$1" > /dev/null sends one ping request to the IP address stored in $1, which is the first program argument, i.e. the target IP. As ping produces a lot of output, we'll just discard that to /dev/null
    4. ... || break will break the 'infinite' while loop if the command before the || operator returns a non-zero value. In case of ping, this happens if at least one ICMP packet was not responded to. If this happens, e.g. because the target machine is down, the program will quit, printing the output from time.
    5. sleep 60 will cause the process to sleep for 60 seconds, after which another ICMP Echo request is sent. Adjust this value to taste. Note that some firewalls will stop responding if you start flooding it with pings.
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