Question

I’m looking for a way to check if a server is still available. We have a offline application that saves data on the server, but if the serverconnection drops (it happens occasionally), we have to save the data to a local database instead of the online database. So we need a continues check to see if the server is still available.

We are using C# for this application

The check on the sqlconnection.open is not really an option because this takes about 20 sec before an error is thrown, we can’t wait this long + I’m using some http services as well.

Answer 1

Just use the System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping class. If your server does not respond to ping (for some reason you decided to block ICMP Echo request) you’ll have to invent your own service for this. Personally, I’m all for not blocking ICMP Echo requests, and I think this is the way to go. The ping command has been used for ages to check reachability of hosts.

using System.Net.NetworkInformation; var ping = new Ping(); var reply = ping.Send('google.com', 60 * 1000); // 1 minute time out (in ms) // or... reply = ping.Send(new IPAddress(new byte[]{127,0,0,1}), 3000);