connect to a server with PHP and see if that server can ping another

Question

I personally don't see how this can be done even though these are my servers. But I want to know if my servers can reach external sites--ping a generic website for example--have outgoing communication. That is, I want to use execute a PHP script on one server, connecting to another of my servers, and test if the second server can ping a website, for example. So I know how to use PHP on the server my script is executing from to ping a website with fopensocket. I just don't know how to set this up to test another server's pingability. I mean I have the credentials but the only way is to have my script on each and every server and then reach the script and execute them. That is not what I want. I want to do this from the one/external server and just feed my script the ip/port/uid/pwd of the server I want to test.

Answer 1

An easy API would look something like:

SERVER1:

// get response from server2
$response = file_get_contents('http://www.server2.com/api.php?method=ping&ip=IP&port=PORT&uid=UID&pwd=PWD');
// do json_decode() if response is json string

SERVER2 (api.php):

// respond to API call
if (isset($_GET['method']) && $_GET['method'] == 'ping') {
    // get other params and do your ping function
    echo $pingresult; // perhaps a json encoded array
    exit;
}

There is no security so you could send an API password or do it with OAuth or HMAC