title: Check if a server is available
body: <p>I'm looking for a way to check if a server is still available.
  We have a offline application that saves data on the server, but if the serverconnection drops (it happens occasionally), we have to save the data to a local database instead of the online database.
  So we need a continues check to see if the server is still available.</p>
  
  <p>We are using C# for this application</p>
  
  <p>The check on the <code>sqlconnection.open</code> is not really an option because this takes about 20 sec before an error is thrown, we can't wait this long + I'm using some http services as well.</p>