Didn't like my previous negative response eh? heheh.
Well windows isn't saying anything at this point. Did your prof. say it could definetly be done? My thought is there is some chance that the hardware in a NIC card may just announce its presence on the network as soon as it gets power. At this point it would be hardware driver stuff only. Layer 1. So about the only thing that would be given is the MAC address. Perhaps if you were to write something that monitored network traffic, it would be able to read the MAC and then check and see if it is still there after a suitable amount of time. If not, then you would know about a boot failure and you would have the machine's MAC address. I don't know for a fact that a card actually does this though. Seems like it would be hardware dependent and most cards I've seen don't actually link up until windows is running and the device drivers are loaded. But you could investigate.
Hi,
When you are talking about Network consist of NT Networks. Then basically it is not a network by defination of Network. Those are Independ system same class of IP address. They recongize each other via protocol called netbios.( Netbui what microsoft calls now a days)
Hence any system can find who is up and who is down by netbios call. these calls are available in 'C'. You can getname of these funstion from bible of windows or even DOS.
Or use Interrupt 21.
But no system, going send message abouts its failure to any body over network unless they boot via remote image (network).
Ex. in old Novell netware days, client m/c as soon as started it detects remote servers and get bootimage from it instead of reading from hdd or floppy. In that case, we may get api from vender to reports each stage.
Currently you can very easily write a program at server m/c which will have ref. copy all m/c on the neighbourhood and using netbios call you can vwerify is it up or not. if not up there can be boot failure or not powered on.
Cheers
~Jayant
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