Remote Server Uptime with VBScript

There are quite a few times when I’ll reboot a server pragmatically and want to know if the reboot was successful, or if the machine has finished rebooting before I continue to run commands against it.

I wasn’t sure of a good way to do that other than looking at the machine’s uptime and making sure that the time it has been up was a shorter amount of time then last time I checked. Seemed like a reasonable way to me, but there was really no built in way to check the server’s uptime in VBscript.

There is a command that you can run, called “uptime” that will reveal the servers uptime in a format that looks something like “x day(s) y hour(s) z minute(s) a second(s)”. This is a pretty handy tool and seems to work well when you are reading the results. However returning a value with all those extra words tacked on didn’t make it very friendly for parsing in a script.

I would have to include a part that would convert that string into a value in seconds. (I bet you didn’t know that there were exactly 86,400 seconds in a single day) I would just have to parse the string so that for every day, hour and minute it would convert those to the proper second value, and then add them all up so that you knew how long the box in question had been up.

So, in order to pull the value via the uptime utility, I have to run the command, save the results, read them and parse the string that was returned so that I can get the values that are stored there. Then once I have the values I can add them all up and return the time, in seconds, that the server has been up.

So, here it is, the function to return, in seconds the amount of time that a particular server has been up:

Function Uptime(sServer)
  'This function will return the uptime of sServer in seconds. This
  'function requires the "uptime.exe" utility.
  '
  'This script is provided under the Creative Commons license located
  'at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/ . It may not
  'be used for commercial purposes with out the expressed written consent
  'of NateRice.com


  Const OpenAsDefault = -2
  Const FailIfNotExist = 0
  Const ForReading = 1

  Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
  Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  sTempFile = oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%TEMP%") & "\runresult.tmp"

  oShell.Run "%comspec% /c uptime " & sServer & " > " & sTempFile, 0, True

  Set fFile = oFSO.OpenTextFile(sTempFile, ForReading, FailIfNotExist, _
  OpenAsDefault)

  On Error Resume next
  sResults = fFile.ReadAll

  If Err.Number <> 0 Then
    GetUptime = -1
    On Error Goto 0
    Exit Function
  End If
    
  fFile.Close
  oFSO.DeleteFile (sTempFile)
    
  If InStr(sResults,"unable to connect") > 0 Then
    GetUptime = 0
    Exit Function
  End If
    
  aSplitAtColon = Split(sResults, ":")
    
  For Each vSplitAtColon In aSplitAtColon
    If InStr(vSplitAtColon, "second(s)") Then
      aSplitAtComma = Split(vSplitAtColon, ",")
      Exit For
    End If
  Next
    
  vTotalTime = 0
  For Each vTimeValue In aSplitAtComma
    If InStr(vTimeValue, "day(s)") Then
      vTimeValue = Trim(Replace(vTimeValue, "day(s)", ""))
      vTimeValue = 86400 * vTimeValue
    End If
    If InStr(vTimeValue, "hour(s)") Then
      vTimeValue = Trim(Replace(vTimeValue, "hour(s)", ""))
      vTimeValue = 3600 * vTimeValue
    End If
    If InStr(vTimeValue, "minute(s)") Then
      vTimeValue = Trim(Replace(vTimeValue, "minute(s)", ""))
      vTimeValue = 60 * vTimeValue
    End If
    If InStr(vTimeValue, "second(s)") Then
      vTimeValue = Trim(Replace(vTimeValue, "second(s)", ""))
    End If
    vTotalTime = vTotalTime + vTimeValue
  Next
    
  Uptime = vTotalTime
    
  Set oShell = Nothing
  Set oFSO = Nothing
End Function

And, if for some reason you want to convert that time in seconds back to a more human readable string, I whipped up another function that would return the time as a string with the scale that it’s being displayed in. This function is called “ReadableTime”:

Function ReadableTime(vSeconds)
  'This function creates readable time in Years:Days:Hours:Minutes:Seconds
  'From the a value (vSeconds) passed in seconds.
  '
  'This script is provided under the Creative Commons liscense located
  'at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/ . It may not
  'be used for comercial purposes with out the expressed written consent
  'of NateRice.com

  If Not IsNumeric(vSeconds) Then
    ReadableTime = -1
    Exit Function
  End If

  vScale = "seconds"

  If vSeconds >= 60 Then
    vSeconds1 = vSeconds Mod 60
    aMinutes = Split((vSeconds / 60), ".")
    vMinutes = aMinutes(0)
    vSeconds = "." & vSeconds1
    vScale = "mm.ss"
  End If

  If vMinutes >= 60 Then
    vMinutes1 = vMinutes Mod 60
    aHours = Split((vMinutes / 60), ".")
    vHours = aHours(0)
    vMinutes = ":" & vMinutes1
    vScale = "hh:mm.ss"
  End If

  If vHours >= 24 Then
    vHours1 = vHours Mod 24
    aDays = Split((vHours / 24), ".")
    vDays = aDays(0)
    vHours = ":" & vHours1
    vScale = "dd:hh:mm.ss"
  End If

  If vDays >= 365 Then
    vDays1 = vDays Mod 365
    aYears = Split((vDays / 365), ".")
    vYears = aYears(0)
    vDays = ":" & vDays1
    vScale = "yyyy:dd:hh:mm.ss"
  End If

  ReadableTime = vYears & vDays & vHours & vMinutes & vSeconds & " (" & vScale & ")"
End Function