March Madness Challenge - MMC03

I wrote a little program that checks if a web server is running at a user specified ip address. While I was browsing to the documentation is saw OptionParse. This is a really nice way to parse arguments. Especially the -h option, that will generate the usage info automatically.

Possible output:

python mmc03.py -i 127.0.0.1 -r /

***** MMC03 *****

Port 80 check successfull!

Webserver is running! Response: 302 Found

python mmc03.py -i 127.0.0.1 -r /

***** MMC03 *****

Port 80 check failed: [Errno 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it

 #! /usr/bin python

 import httplib

 def checkPort(ip, resource):
         if not resource.startswith('/'):
                 resource = '/' + resource

         try:
                 conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(ip, httplib.HTTP_PORT)
                 conn.request('GET', resource)
                 response = conn.getresponse()
                 print 'Port %s check successfull!' % httplib.HTTP_PORT
                 if (httplib.responses[response.status]):
                         print 'Webserver is running! Response: %s %s' % \
                                         (response.status, response.reason)
         except Exception, e:
                 print 'Port %s check failed: %s' % (httplib.HTTP_PORT, e)
                 return False
         finally:
                 conn.close()

 if __name__ == '__main__':
         print '***** MMC03 *****'

         from optparse import OptionParser
         parser = OptionParser()
         parser.add_option("-i", "--ip", dest="ip", default='127.0.0.1',
                         help='ip address of server')
         parser.add_option("-r", "--resource", dest="resource", default="/",
                         help="resource to check")
         (options, args) = parser.parse_args()

         checkPort(options.ip, options.resource)