See if a system is up and running..

[klibby]

I'm not sure if this is possible with Perl... but is there any way to take an IP address of a system running a web server and see if it is up or down, then return that to the Perl script so it can do something for whether it is up or down?

 

[perlone]

Not really. But there is abotehr module that could do similar.

use Net:ing;

if ( pingecho("

http://www.yahoo.com",

15) ) {
print "Yahoo webserver is rechable!";
}else{
print "Yahoo is unreachable!";
}

Net:ing will check to see if the system is running. If it is, it sends a reply.
-Aaron

 

[perlone]

Man, i better check my spell check. It's suppose to be *another* not abotehr -Aaron

 

[klibby]

ahh cool.... do you know where I can get that mod?

 

[perlone]

If you have perl version 5 installed, it's already came with that. So you don't actually need to download the module. -Aaron

 

[klibby]

Thank you Aaron, I have one question though... what exactly is the 15 in the little piece of code you gave me?....

I tried the following code just to test...

if (pingecho("

http://www.eqguardians.com";,

15) ) {
print "SERVER IS UP";
}else{
print "SERVER IS DOWN";
}


that returned a 500 error, so i got rid of the ";" after the "eqguardians.com" and left the comma and tried that.. it didnt return a 500 error but returned the "server is down" message when the server was really up...

I just figured, knowing what the 15 was might help hehe

 

[klibby]

oops.... the code i tried didnt have TWO semi colons after the "

http://www.eqguardians.com"

btw hehe.. dunno how that got in there

 

[perlone]

use Net:ing;

if ( pingecho("

http://www.yahoo.com

", 15) ) {
print "Yahoo server is up!";
}else{
print "Whoops, server is unreachable!";
}

The first is a host to find-

http://www.yahoo.com

in this case. The second, 15 is the seconds indicates how long pingecho should wait for a response in seconds. Hope this helps.


-Aaron

 

[klibby]

ok.. it looks like the code is working.... however, it keeps returning the server is DOWN message no matter whether the system is really up or down, I tried

http://www.yahoo.com

like in your example, tried my IP address, and tried

http://www.eqguardians.com

(my own domain where I tried the script)... then just to make sure i wasnt switching the two messages, I tried

http://www.lkh245gow8e.com

to see if it would return server is UP message.. still says down... so its saying down no matter what... any ideas?

 

[klibby]

hmm.. actually, I may know the problem.... but dont know how to get arround it..... I noticed, even when I try a timeout of say 50, the script will load up on my browser and display the down message fast.. (a few seconds or less)... so, though in that test when i gave it a 50 second timeout... it wasnt waiting for the timeout, it was simply going through and executing the code without even waiting for a reply.... any way to fix this?

 

[perlone]

I haven't used that module for a long time. But if you need more info, here it is:

http://search.cpan.org/doc/RMOSE/Net-Ping-2.02/Ping.pm

-Aaron

 

[klibby]

wow, fast response hehe thanks for all your help =)

 

[scott203]

Hey, I dont really know, but wouldnt that number be in millisecs? and 15-50 millisecs is way too short to wait for a ping... try like 1000. If it were really 15 secs you were waiting, then it should take 15 secs for the script to print "server is down"

 

[klibby]

nope, it is in seconds... but i tried using up to 15000 for timeout anyway hehe.. still said it was down, still didnt take any time to load

 

[Rajoidea]

There's an alternative format for Net:ing that I like to use as well, which may yield better results for you. This is an excerpt from a script I use to, as you said, see if a machine is up or down. This (part of the code - don't ask about the rest ) runs great in Windows 2000, but I haven't tested it in *nix.

$p = Net::Ping->new("$protocol_choice");
 if ($p->ping($node, $timeout))
  { 		
   print "$node is pingable \n"; 
  }
 else 
  {
   print "$node is \*NOT\* pingable \n"; 
  }
$p->close();

The timeout is in seconds, and the protocols are the standard TCP, ICMP, and UDP. The default protocol is UDP, and the default timeout is 5 seconds. I think I remember seeing something in the perl documentation from Activestate that said pingecho was obsolete, which could be part of the problem. Hope I'm not too late to be of help.