Do you have a website hosted on a server somewhere – either in your home or in the cloud? Has it ever gone down and you didn’t know about it for hours? I have, and it has happened to me too many times.
As a result, I have often wanted/needed a way to verify that the server which is hosting my websites is up and running properly. While many fine graphical tools exist such as Munin for this purpose, I wanted a simple set of utilities that could return just the parameters I needed and how I needed them.