Make sure a host is alive

[Anon]

Hello,
I need to make sure a domain or ip can respond to http. I have tried using system calls to ping the host, but if the host is dead, it just hangs. Is there something that I can do to make sure that at least http can respond?

Bill

[Anon]

try wget. Nice little program. I've got a couple of little test pages on my main server and use a cron job at home to hit it with wget every hour and parse the output to see if things like the database and web server are up.

[Anon]

if (($socket = fsockopen( $ip, $port, &$errno, &$errstr, $timeout))
   {
   echo "Somebody is at least listening on port 80";
   fclose($socket);
   }
else
   {
   echo "No response on port $port within $timeout seconds: ";
   echo "$errstr ($errno)";
   }