6 replies to this topic

[test]

Hi, i'm in a bind. I have to leave in a couple of weeks, and I need to quickly set up a sort of connection monitor on my parents' computer for their internet. Their router is stuck in a separate room, so they can't tell what speed they are connected from Windows XP. I need to make an icon on their desktop that they can click on to quickly and easily view what speed their internet is connected at.
A program or script that simply writes 'Connected at full speed.' or 'Connected at half speed.' to a command prompt window would be more than sufficient.

To find out what speed it is connected at, I typically have to type the following sequence of commands:
start->run-> telnet 192.168.0.1
send: mypassword
send: 24 (menu navigating)
send: 1 (menu navigating)

After doing this, the following shows up on telnet:

CHAN Link Type TXPkt RXPkt Error CLU ALU Up Time
B1 PeoplePC 64Kbps 1341306 1771895 0 71% 11% 2:16:10
B2 PeoplePC 64Kbps 1168961 1591175 0 81% 11% 2:16:08

If B2 has 'PeoplePC' next to it, that means the internet is connected at full speed (128k). If the internet is -NOT- connected at full speed, the screen looks like this, with -- in place of B2 and Idle and 0Kbps next to it:

CHAN Link Type TXPkt RXPkt Error CLU ALU Up Time
B1 PeoplePC 64Kbps 1341367 1771968 0 0% 11% 2:19:38
-- Idle 0Kbps 1169041 1591256 0 0% 0% 0:00:00

To summarize, I need to make an icon which runs a script that will telnet into the router, navigate the menus, and then send a message back to the user via command prompt or some other method. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could use to do this, something that doesn't require a large learning curve preferably? Thanks.

[Lop]

I would recommend something simple like Visual Basic or C#. Maybe even Java?

[Crane]

It looks like you are using ISDN, right? Why not just show them how to telnet and do those steps above?

[John]

If you don't need a GUI, you can probably get away with creating a batch file.

[test]

Yes this is an ISDN line. My parents are not computer savvy at all. I've tried showing them how to do this, but they get confused very easily... They also don't like to have to go through all of these steps each time they use the internet.

I've tried creating a batch file, but as soon as it opens the telnet connection, it will not send any further commands to it.

[CygnetGames]

Have you considered using Python?
There's probably a Python library that you can use to send the Telnet commands, and get the result back to Python. Then you can have Python parse the result and display a message to the user.

Python could give them a message in a command prompt (rediculously easy to program), or you could make a simple GUI very easily using Tk.

[test]

No I haven't. Unfortunately, i've never used Python/Tk, and the programming experience I do have is about 10 years old (all but forgotten.)

I can look into that though. I'm not sure if I have time currently to learn a new programming language to get this to work though. I wish there was a simple way of doing this with WinXP.