Script: Checking Alive Servers from a Server List

With a list of servers, it is common that one or more are down or crash. Lots cluster management tools can detect the aliveness of servers. However, it can be easily done with ping with a Bash script.

I summarize the script that I used and share it here:

check-alive-server.sh.

Usage:

usage: ./check-alive-server.sh file
Each host in one line in the file

The mechanism and tool used behind this is quite straightforward: just ping (that’s right, the ping command) the host and check the results. For example, to check whether a server $line is alive:

ping -W1 -c1 $line | grep received | awk '{print $4}

This produces “0” if the server can not be reached by ping (very possibly down).

Eric Ma