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João Pinto
Asked: 2010-11-10 05:48:23 +0800 CST

Need an applet to report web sites unavailability

  • 772

Is there a gnome applet that will let me configure a list of URLs to be verified and report when some is unavailable ? Preferably using notifiations.

The validation must use HTTP GET or HEAD .

applet monitoring

3 Answers

  1. You could write a small bash script to throw notifications at you... Something like:

    #!/bin/bash

for site in $(cat ~/.sites); do
    if ! ping -c 1 -w 5 "$site" &>/dev/null ; then 
      notify-send "$site is down!!"
    fi
done

    Your list of sites to check lives in ~/.sites.

    Then you just need to cron that up to run. You might need to export DISPLAY=:0 in cron so the notification shows up in the right place.

    Note that if you use a DNS intermediary like OpenDNS, if a domain name you ping doesn't exist, it'll hit their no-domain search server. Therefore it's probably safer (though less informative) to use IPs.

    oli@bert:~$ ping asasdslfkjsdlff.com
PING asasdslfkjsdlff.com (67.215.65.132) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hit-nxdomain.opendns.com (67.215.65.132): icmp_req=1 ttl=54 time=33.1 ms
64 bytes from hit-nxdomain.opendns.com (67.215.65.132): icmp_req=2 ttl=54 time=32.8 ms
    • 3
  2. Best Answer

    Maybe you can take this as a base (needs python-appindicator and python-notify):

    import gtk
import gobject
import urllib2
import pynotify
import appindicator

urls = ["http://askubuntu.com",
        "http://not.available.com"]

ind = appindicator.Indicator("url-checker", "indicator-messages",
                              appindicator.CATEGORY_APPLICATION_STATUS)
ind.set_status(appindicator.STATUS_ACTIVE)
ind.set_attention_icon ("indicator-messages-new")
menu = gtk.Menu()
# yadda yadda yadda
ind.set_menu(menu)

def update(urls, ind):
    err = ""
    for url in urls:
        try:
            if (urllib2.urlopen(url).getcode() != 200):
                err += "%s is down\n" % url
        except urllib2.URLError:
            err += "%s is down\n" % url
    if err:
        ind.set_status(appindicator.STATUS_ATTENTION)
        pynotify.Notification("Bad news:", err).show()
    else:
        ind.set_status(appindicator.STATUS_ACTIVE)

    return True

update(urls, ind)
timeout = 300000 # 5 minutes
gobject.timeout_add(timeout, update, urls, ind)
gtk.main()
    • 3

  3. You can install the link-monitor-applet (see the homepage) which puts this functionality on your gnome panel very elegantly. Link Monitor is in repositories, so :

    sudo apt-get install link-monitor-applet

    However, I suspect that since you said "URL" you might be looking at something that does a GET to the websites, reporting if it doesn't get a response? Can you clarify if a simple ping is enough? Some websites, for example, won't let you ping them. Worse, getting a ping doesn't guarantee that the website is actually up.

    Since you've specified that you'd like this solution to be URL-based, you can use Oli's solution above, but first :

    sudo apt-get install httping

    And the script becomes :

    #!/bin/bash

for site in $(cat ~/.sites); do
    if ! httping -c 1 -g "$site" &>/dev/null ; then 
      notify-send "$site is down!!"
    fi
done

    NOTE : This wasn't working for me until I realised that I had configured my home router to use OpenDNS. This means that timed-out sites are redirected to the OpenDNS landing page instead, meaning that this script never generated an on-screen notification! One to watch.

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