The dbping utility is provided to help in troubleshooting connections. In particular, you can use it to test if a server with a particular name is available on your network.
The dbping utility takes a connection string as an option, but by default only those pieces required to locate a server are used. By default, it does not attempt to start a server, but may if the -d option is specified.
The following command line tests to see if a server named Waterloo is available over a TCP/IP connection:
dbping -c "ENG=Waterloo;CommLinks=tcpip"
The following command tests to see if a default server is available on the current computer.
dbping
Testing embedded SQL connection performance