nanog mailing list archives

Re: Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging


From: Peter Beckman <beckman () angryox com>
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2022 18:29:43 -0500

On Tue, 8 Feb 2022, Christopher Morrow wrote:

you know what you COULD do though... probe it with DNS requests, and then
you know, test the service being offered, and still know that 'the internet
is not on fire'.

 What?!? Use UDP to test the Internet? How would you even know if the
 Internet was fine but some router didn't like how your packet smelled and
 dropped it? ;-)

 Seriously though, if ICMP is becoming the problem this thread seems to
 believe, TCP rather than UDP is probably a better judge of the
 "availability of the Internet" as the remote end is going to attempt to
 respond.

 Though I cannot argue that lack of DNS also can indicate why Chicken
 Little is perturbed.

 I don't have any issues with ICMP generally, though I'm usually sending
 such packets to systems and servers and networks I control or have
 permission/access to.

 For people that don't have access to multiple servers dotted around the
 Internet, is it time for them to move away from ICMP and start using HTTP
 HEAD TCP requests to well-known websites to determine if a route is
 available and functioning? That's a lot more data when multiplied by a few
 million queries per second, just to check that the Internet is up... but
 also less likely to get filtered or throttled to the point where you get
 no response, even though the sky is not falling.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman () angryox com                                https://www.angryox.com/
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