I'm creating a support site for a hosting company in D7 and one of the features that they have asked for is for drupal to ping each of the servers, (I have a content type called Server which has ipaddresses attached to it) and report back the status. I want to set it up as cron job. Is there a module for Drupal that I can add that gives me this feature? if not can you give me any pointers how to get started on building one?

Thanks

Kieran Briggs