On 8/30/06, Matt Todd <chiology / gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, so, I quickly googled and was not able to find anything specific, but
> what I'm trying to do is find an elegant way to check for a network/internet
> connection. (I specifically need the internet, but a network connection
> needs to be preset as well for that... except for dial up? Gah.)
>
> So, from your collection experiences, what do you think is the best, most
> elegant way to check for a network connection or an internet connection?
> Should I just ping an address?
>
> And, sorry if I missed something obvious.
>
> M.T.
>
>

This isn't easy to do, in the general case. I assume you're just
trying to find out if you have a live connection to the WWW (including
firewall openings and DNS availability), so you could try this:


TCPSocket.new( "www.rubyforge.org", 80)

If it doesn't throw anything, you're golden. Make sure to add a
timeout loop (I usually wait no more than 4 seconds) because depending
on what is wrong, this call may hang for a long time. Don't use ping-
many firewalls block it.