Re: Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

On 2/9/22 18:19, Joe Greco wrote:

> So what people really want is to be able to "ping internet" and so far
> the easiest thing people have been able to find is "ping 8.8.8.8" or
> some other easily remembered thing.

Pretty much - both people and "things".


> Does this mean that perhaps we should seriously consider having some
> TLD being named "internet", with maybe a global DNS redirector that lets
> service providers register appropriate upstream targets for their
> customers, and then maybe also allow for some form of registration such
> that if I wanted to provide a remote ping target for AS14536, I could
> somehow register "as14536.internet" or "solnet.internet"?
>
> Fundamentally, this is a valid issue.  As the maintainer of several BGP
> networks, I can't really rely on an upstream consumer ISP to be the
> connectivity helpdesk when something is awry.  It would really be nice
> to have a list of officially sanctioned testing points so that one could
> just do "ping google.internet" or "ping level3.internet" or "ping
> comcast.internet" or "ping aws.internet" and get a response.
>
> The problem with this is that someone will try to make what could be a
> relatively simple thing complicated, and we'll end up needing a special
> non-ping client and some trainwreck of names and other hard-to-grok
> garbage, and then we're perilously close to coming back to the current
> situation where people are using arbitrary targets out on the Internet
> for connectivity testing.

Totally agree - we need to be deliberate about creating something that 
is not only simple, but memorable, in addition to being built for purpose.

But I also agree that this will likely create an opportunity to 
over-complicate what should be simple. We'll need to put in as much 
effort into resisting complexity, as we will designing a solution.

Mark.