I am some what new to DNS and Linux scripting.

I have a debian server in a remote secure location with power back up and will be mainly the primary nameserver for the domain names that I manage.

I want to write a shell script on this server that will check my main web production server (which is in a different physical location then my primary nameserver) and verify that it is up and running. If the web server does not respond, the shell script, then would point my domain name to a my back-up web server. My back-up web server is in a different physical location then my primary nameserver and my production web server.

I have done alot of searching for this topic, and mostly I have found web sites that advertise this service for a fee. I would like to do this myself.

Is there a linux command that I can run that would check a remote web server and verify if it is up or not?

Thank you for your help.
Joe

wget will return 0 when it sucessfully retrieves a document from a specified URL, or 1 if it fails. $? is a special variable that holds the return value of the previous command.

Happy scripting

Thank you for your help!
I will give this a try.