Consider the situation where the webserver has crashed, but the underlying machine is running perfectly OK.

You might prefer to generate a special page with a particular value (e.g. 'success') which you can then retrieve, and if it comes back ok, then Everything Must Be All Right(tm).

Something like

use LWP::Simple;

print "Broken!\n" unless get('http://your.site/page') eq 'success';
[download]

Alternatively, you could go to the Uptime tool at arsdigita.com, where someone else has done the work for you!

andy.