Shoutcast Server Status

[Sonikku]

Is there a way to display whether my shoutcast server is up or not? I was thinking possibly pinging or checking the status of mysite.com:8000. Is there a way to do this?

[bretticus]

Probably,

I would point telnet at your server via

telnet yourserverurl 8000

just to see what to expect when the connection opens. Some servers only respond when the client initiates the connection and communicates first (httpd for example.) So you'll need to try it and if you do not see anything, do some research. PHP has a useful function:

fsockopen

Pay particular attention to the timeout parameter. Most likely, the way you'll know your server is down is if the socket connection attempt times out before anticipated.

I haven't tried this but this is how I would go about it.

[bretticus]

If you are going to be displaying this information on a page that you don't wanna bog down if the connection is down (your webpage wouldn't come up until the timeout was up), you may wanna use a cronjob that runs a background program to check. It could write to a text file for status information, for example. PHP CLI could be used for the background process.