Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx and pinging Web ports

[Andy Gaynor]

Wayne Buttles <address@hidden> writes:
>> I have to get some network monitoring done.  Part of this involves pinging 
>> Web
>> ports to make sure they're alive and functioning.  I intend to do something
>> silly like "lynx -source url | fgrep -i </html>".
>
> You would be better off adding a -head in there and grepping for "200 OK"
> however it would seem that if a real host is dead then the wait is forever.
> Try lynx -source -head http://news.champlain.edu
Thanks!  If my pinging was restricted to process-level granularity, this would
be what I'd do.

> Gee, so is ours.  I believe a 9gig drive siezed *sigh* and that is why I used
> the above example.
We've had an epidemic, youthful and vibrant hard disks have been finding their
way to an early grave lately.  6 or 7 drives over the past three or four
months.  Sigh.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Sergent <address@hidden> writes:
> [kermit version of connect host 80, get /, echo status]
                                      ^^^^^
This is what I'm looking for, http protocol things.  The RFCs were drowning me.

> As far as getting less output, you could send a HEAD request if it's a server
> which supports HEAD, and just check for, say, a Content-type header.
Ding.  You just whapped the dog of ignorance on the nose with the newspaper of
enlightentment.  When I throw "HEAD / HTML 1.0\r\n" at the server, it returns
acceptable status information.  I wasn't looking forward to regularly snarfing
the root document with "GET / ...".  This is what I was looking for, really.
What other interesting commands can I throw at the server?

> You could, of course, also do this with something like Perl but it's probably
> less work (apart from learning the scripting language, maybe) to use Kermit.

This is part of a pinger I'm writing which checks multiple services
asynchronously and reports the results interactively in a buffer as an
assertion-based tree/hierarchy of services and ping results.  I'm using Emacs
Lisp, btw.

Perl?  Pthtooey, Perl.  I considered Perl and recently spent a day getting a
handle on it and experimenting with it.  Perl is the most disgusting
amalgamation of programming language misfeatures and clashing paradigms that I
have ever seen together in one language, in a singular and superlative sense.
Perl gives me the impression of Rodney Dangerfield.  I can appreciate
excellence, and Perl is the Dom of foul languages.  My mother'd blush my bottom
if she heard I was using such foul language.  I could make a career in computer
science simply critiquing and criticising Perl.  Hell, I could make a career in
psychology analyzing the warped and tortured Frankensteinesque soul that
conceived this pathetic and pitiable monster.  Let's get some torches...  That
is, I don't like Perl much.

While Emacs Lisp is no prize, it has the fundamental sanity of a Lisp and is
fairly efficient as well.  In the next couple years, I hope that things like
ScSh and Guile will prove their worth, but I can't assert their existence where
I need them right now.  They are good Scheme implementations with coherent and
comprehensive OS interfaces.  From what I've seen of ScSh, there's even some
elegance mixed into its OS interface beyond that of Scheme.  Tk/Tcl might also
have served, but, to be honest, I've only had limited exposure to them, and
they didn't distinguish themselves.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Gentlefolks, tanks for your prompt and informed responses,
      ___                    ___
    _<_ _>====    and      _<_ _>====
   (o_o_o_o)              (o_o_o_o)    .

Regards, [Ag]

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