I threw this little script together today when checking why a PHP/Flash/MySQL application has stopped working.

The application itself looks and works fine, but I suspected a firewall block between the web server and database server. Without SSH access to this shared server I had to get inventive.

So I tested that PHP could open a socket on the right port to my server…

<?php
 $site = "www.google.com";
 $port = 80;
 $fp = fsockopen($site,$port,$errno,$errstr,10);
 if(!$fp) {
 echo "Cannot connect to server: $errno - $errstr";
 } else {
 echo "Connect was successful - no errors on Port ".$port." at ".$site;
 fclose($fp);
 }
 ?>