Script to check if a server / machine is up and running

Guys you might often come across some situations where you want to check if a server or machine is physically up and running. Quite obviously you would use the ping command to do so.

But in today's post let us write a simple bash script to automate this.

#!/bin/bash

#program to check if a server/machine is up and running

ipaddr=192.168.1.34

ping -c 4 $ipaddr >> /dev/null

if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]

then

echo "FAIL: Server seems to be down and not responding" 

else

echo "SUCCESS : Server is up and running"

fi

Note : $? is a special Unix variable to check if the previous command was executed successfully or not. It returns a numerical value - either 0 or 1. If the command was executed successfully, it returns 0, else if not, it returns 1.

In above script, simply replace the variable 'ipaddr' value to your server's ip address and check.

Also note that by redirecting the output of the ping command to /dev/null, we are suppressing and silencing the output i.e the ping o/p will not be shown on terminal. If you want to see the exact output of ping, remove the ">> /dev/null" part.

Output :

./PingServer.sh

SUCCESS : Server is up and running

Cheers!