net view \\computername
 

Works fine, but how about several computers at once? Is there windows command to show all powered on PC's on a lan ? Or all shares ?
 
H.

net view shows all systems on the network, and then DF's command will give you the shares on a given system. You can also pipe the results to a text file.

Ok thanks Alec and the rest of you for your net view reminder, but surely if I dont switch one machine on at all...after several reboots of the other, it should not still be showing shares of the one thats has always been off?
 
And shouldnt ME shows its own shares in Network Neighbourhood? XP does...
 
I dont suppose it really matters....I like things being just so, as you may have noticed

Quote:net view shows all systems on the network, and then DF's command will give you the shares on a given system. You can also pipe the results to a text file.

Clutch, not that I argue with you, but just net view reads the cache i.e. it also shows all computers that have been powered on recently (the posters orig problem). DF's command returns an error code if the PC is off, real time, as it is polling that machine.

I find it strange that there (apparently) is no way to see only currently active PC's on a LAN with one command. Same goes for connected shares, I guess. AFAIK, there isn't really an easy way to display all currently connected users either, except in some circumstances thru the task manager.

The most practical solution I've found to do this is to use a script or a batch file, pinging all the PC's of the LAN. There are also plenty of 3rd party apps that show connected computers, but I haven't found one that is both freeware and can automatically print the results to a file. A good one though is Bopup, shows you all info in a window and can (manually) print to a file.

The reason I want to do this is that I use a great little app called CoolMon (it is really cool) to show my system stats on the desktop, and I wanted to include the status of the PC's on my home LAN. Works fine know with a script & DLL off their site !

H.

Cool, I like your suggestions Alec, I will definately give them a try!
 
If I dont get anywhere I might check out those little programs Dirty Harry suggests.
 
Like the IF EXIST idea...will give that a go...let you know how it goes.

DH, use nbtstat -R (case sensitive) to purge and reload the cache on the local machine, then try net view again.

Quote:DH, use nbtstat -R (case sensitive) to purge and reload the cache on the local machine, then try net view again.


OK Clutch , if somebody knows networks here its you so obviously there is no magic "show all connected computers real time" command in windows.

Rrrright, purging the cache works, and I even had a batchfile running that did that for a while. I wasn't quite what I was after, as then the PC's have to register themselves again, maybe trigger a new MB election, maybe interfere with LAN operations etc. I was twisting the question a bit; how do I know (constantly) which machines are on and which off, and pipe that. The Coolmon way my desktop is right now showing among other data:

PC1- OFF
PC-2 ON

Just text on a transparent backround, like I would have typed it on the wallpaper. This data gets updated every minute or whatever using the scheduler, and thats a bit too often to trigger a MB election. And no, I'm not in the marketing dept for those guys, its open source freeware, but its just fantastic.

As mentioned, If you just wan't to know this every now and then the easiest way is to d/l some freware.

H.

That's pretty cool, I just haven't had a need for something like that before and wouldn't want to generate the extra traffic for that. Kind of a spiffy solution for your problem though.