This one's quick and easy.

Create a new Shell command and type this in :

ping -c1 website.com | grep ' 0%'

Click on Hide Output.

Set the Refresh to something not crazy, like 600 or 1200. This is in seconds and you don't want it at 20 or you'll ping bomb your own site. 600 is 10 minutes and 1200 is 20 minutes. If your site is down so much that you need to check more often than that, change providers.

Now go to the Icon tab and select Show Icon and Force Title. Type your websites name in the title field and click the Default button in the icon group. You will probably want to resize the height down to 20 and the width to the width of the text. Then place it on the screen in a convenient location.

You will now have a little GeekTool doggle that looks like this:

It's like magic! If it's green, you're good. If it's red, you'll need to sent an angry letter to your host.

I hope to soon have more of these up showing various aspects of GeekTool functionality. I also want some tools to check to see that the web site's database is running (something I've had problems with before) and the web site pages are accessible. Just because the web server was pinged, doesn't mean everything is hunky dory.

Related posts:

1. New GeekTool Script: Database Checker This, of course, goes hand in hand with the Web...
2. New GeekTool Script: Bloglines Notifier In honor of me trying to get a job with...
3. New GeekTool Scripts: GeekTool Minutiae I've been hoarding this little gem of a post for...

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2005 at 8:05 pm by Joe and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.