Question

Ive been trying to do what i thought would be a simple reachability of host test at the beginning of my apps internet ventures, but documentation isnt helping and neither are examples found at various places, ive tried many solutions with no luck, so if anyone could point me in the direction of a definitive way to check a hosts availability with android that be awesome, just need it to toggle a bool to true if the host can be reached

im using API8 if that makes much difference to this process, and must cater for non-rooted devices so the inetaddress.isReachable is out

Answer 1

It’s not pretty but this is how I did it:

boolean exists = false;

try {
    SocketAddress sockaddr = new InetSocketAddress(ip, port);
    // Create an unbound socket
    Socket sock = new Socket();

    // This method will block no more than timeoutMs.
    // If the timeout occurs, SocketTimeoutException is thrown.
    int timeoutMs = 2000;   // 2 seconds
    sock.connect(sockaddr, timeoutMs);
    exists = true;
} catch(IOException e) {
    // Handle exception
}