Question Remote connection and what to do...

[GhostTownCowboy]

Howdy, I'm new to the forums, and not entirely sure where to post this so please feel free to move it as you see fit.

My issue is this:

I'm a gamer... The game I play has servers that go down weekly for maintenance. I am working on a stand alone application that will, for lack of a better word "ping" the server to see if it's up or not. This is to prevent having to load the game only to find out it's down...

This is what I have so far:
(vb.net 2008)

Public Class Form1

Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

End Sub

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

If My.Computer.Network.Ping("72.55.177.140") Then
Label1.Text = "Server Online"
Else
Label1.Text = "Server Offline"
End If

If My.Computer.Network.Ping("72.55.177.140") Then
Label2.Text = "Server Online"
Else
Label2.Text = "Server Offline"
End If

If My.Computer.Network.Ping("72.55.177.140") Then
Label3.Text = "Server Online"
Else
Label3.Text = "Server Offline"
End If

If My.Computer.Network.Ping("www.aeriagames.com") Then
Label6.Text = "Server Online"
Else
Label6.Text = "Server Offline"
End If
End Sub
End Class

I'm 99% certain the Ip's are correct, however I'm not as sure about the ports. Apparently the company runs all 3 servers off of one machine.

Using "WireShark" I came up with the following ports:

11091
11092
11093

My Main issue is that the program won't ping the server at all. I can ping it from the web, and I can ping the web site but not the server. Also, not all 3 servers go down at the same time. I would love to be able to poll them individually as you can see in the code.

Here is a link to the project... Free File Hosting Made Simple - MediaFire

The game also has another feature I would LOVE to tap into. certain events happen at irregular intervals, the server however sends a signal that tells the client to display a message 10 minutes before each event, then once every minute until the event occurs. If there is someway to show this in an app on the desktop while the client is minimized that would be AWESOME!

Any help will be greatly appreciated.