Check if host is alive

[Anon]

Is there a way using php to check if another server is alive.
I want to check to see if a certain server (irc.blah.com for example) is alive and if it is print something like "Irc is active" if not print "Sorry irc is unavailable". is there a way using php to do this ?

[Anon]

If you are checking for example an IRC server, you can use fsockopen to check if you can connect to the IRC port of that server.
This will report "connection timedout" or "connection refused" if the server is not available.
Otherwise on unix you can execute a ping
ping -c2 www.site.bla and parse the output to see if it worked.