Down for everyone or just me?

By stretch | Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 6:04 p.m. UTC

Some time ago I stumbled across a handy tool for verifying whether a remote site was down or simply unreachable from my location: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.

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True, the domain is a bit unwieldy, and no details are offered on just how thorough the tool is (or isn't), but it can offer at least one recourse before hopping on IRC to proclaim that the sky is falling. Not that that ever happens.

About the Author

Jeremy Stretch is a networking engineer and the maintainer of PacketLife.net. He currently lives in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Although employed full-time out of necessity, his true passion lies in improving the field of network engineering around the world. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

Posted in Resources

Comments

Ali (guest) commented on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 9:03 p.m. UTC

lynx -dump http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/alouche.net | head -n 1 It's just you. [1]http://alouche.net is up.

Looking at my logs

64.233.172.20 - - [20/Oct/2009:20:28:56 +0000] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 302 0 "-" "AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine; appid: downforeveryoneorjustme)"
64.233.172.20 - - [20/Oct/2009:20:28:57 +0000] "HEAD /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine; appid: downforeveryoneorjustme)"

It is just sending a HEAD... good enough.

Due to the fact that it is using the google APP engine, it is either running Java or Python, hopefully the latter ;-)

mellowd commented on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 12:04 a.m. UTC

I use this quite often. It can be pretty handy.

On a lighthearted note, ask it if downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ is down and see what it says :P

xenny (guest) commented on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 12:51 p.m. UTC

For popular sites, I usually just look for the site name on twitterfall. If it's down, it swiftly becomes apparent :-)

gnmedia (guest) commented on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 8:51 p.m. UTC

Here is another cool link I like to use whenever I have a customer saying that his site is down:

http://internetsupervision.com/scripts/urlcheck/check.aspx

gnmedia

some bloke (guest) commented on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 9:12 a.m. UTC

If the site is down, wouldn't you then like to know when it goes back up?

Solution: SiteUpAlert.com

(yes, its a shameless self plug, but come on, its exactly on target)

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