Alternative to ping [closed]

Question

I want to see if an Amazon EC2 instance is open, but by default Amazon EC2 blocks ping requests. There is a way to do this by changing the security policy of the instance. Excluding that, what would be the closest alternative to "see if a server is responsive" and is light-weight?

Is curl a good option?

Answer 1

If you can ssh to it then it's up. A simple way of checking this with nc is: nc -zv 111.222.333.444 22 (Replace 111.222.333.444 with the ip address of your instance)