Useful ping targets for end-users?

[Adam Thompson <athompson () merlin mb ca>]

Before you start reading, yes, I fully understand how silly this question is.  But I need to give _something_ to a 
customer who has the ability to run ping/traceroute but nothing else.  (And they have an intermittent latency problem 
that we haven’t been able to isolate yet.)

Does anyone curate a list of “useful” ICMP responders that are at least kinda-sorta reliable/expected to continue 
responding?  For example, all the major anycast DNS cloud providers respond to ICMP, but I don’t really want to tell my 
customer to ping an anycast IP address because the RTT results will be useless data (for comparative purposes).
I’m also not excited about providing random router IP address for what should be obvious reasons.  There are some IPs 
that my routing paths that should be stable, but between routing changes and control-plane policing, those aren’t 
awesome.  I’m looking for IPs I can suggest that are well outside my network.

Restatement: yes, there are much better ways to diagnose problems, but my customer can only run ping & traceroute (and 
pathping, I suppose) and is capable enough to run those tools and self-assess before calling me.

It sounds foolish to even ask, but maybe there’s a resource out there I don’t know about…
-Adam

Adam Thompson
Consultant, Infrastructure Services
[MERLIN]
100 - 135 Innovation Drive
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
(204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
athompson () merlin mb ca<mailto:athompson () merlin mb ca>
www.merlin.mb.ca<http://www.merlin.mb.ca/>