Date: 10/15/06 (Web Development)    Keywords: web, hosting

Started writing a rather simple cronScript on the company dev. server that pings and fetches the index page of the companies websites.  The purpose is to track it's status (200 or 403), latency from the perspective of the dev server, and then if the server is down for twice or more in a hour, to page me.  Before I really put more energy into it, does anyone know of a free ware system (not service) that does the same thing?

Note:
   Scripts can not be run on the production/live servers.  I have root via SSH, but I really don't want to login to them and modify the environment in anyway unless it's to fix something.

Why:
    Previous developer randomly picked the current hosting service and they've become unreliable (network outages w/vague explanations as to why but its not our servers)

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/webdev/360763.html