[thelist] automatically ping/check maintenance sites?

[Shashank Tripathi]

If you don't believe in reinventing the wheel, you could consider
services that already exist for precisely this purpose, such as
www.atwatch.com or www.internetseer.com.

If you really must have something of your own, a simple way of doing
this would be have a script ping or tracert to your website and then set
this up as a cron job, say, at 20 minutes intervals. The script
(Perl/PHP/Shell) checks for the text returned from the system commands,
and if certain text is encountered -- e.g., "Ping request could not find
host" -- then send out a mail alert.

Hth,
Shanx

www.shanx.com