Comment 2 for bug 1256118

https://reviews.mahara.org/#/c/2757/
I have added a function in elasticsearch to check to see if one can connect to the host/port with the given elasticsearch host and port details.

I tried using the inbuilt Elastica functions like getConnection() or isEnabled() to achieve a similar thing but there was instances where I could generate false positives / negatives if I ran
sudo /etc/init.d/elasticsearch stop
or
sudo /etc/init.d/elasticsearch start

After certain pages had already loaded

The inbuilt checks seem to be one page load behind actual state.