Hi Elliott,
You haven't actually stated what will happen (or what you want to have happen) if the remote site is actually 'down'.

If you want notification by eMail (and lots of other diagnostic tools) then try Nagios formerly known as NetSaint. I recommended this before a few days ago and is a very good solution for this type of scenario.

From the Nagios site:

What is Nagios? An open source host, service and network monitoring program. Who uses it? Lots of people, including many big name companies and organizations.
It's also written in perl... HTH

In reply to Re: How do I tell if a remote site is up? by barrd
in thread How do I tell if a remote site is up? by Elliott

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.