Re: Useful ping targets for end-users?

[Dave Taht <dave.taht () gmail com>]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 7:37 AM Adam Thompson <athompson () merlin mb ca>
wrote:

> 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.)

Over on this enormous thread, a gang of dedicated openwrt developers have
been attempting to build an automated latency with load sensing tool
leveraging sch_cake, currently targetted at LTE. They've released a few
versions of the tool in lua and shell, so far.

Among other things, they've discovered that icmp type 13 (with a timestamp)
actually works in many cases, and have a curated list mechanism, and
means to kick out  and cope with various forms of responders.

> 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
> [image: MERLIN]
> 100 - 135 Innovation Drive
> Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
> (204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
> athompson () merlin mb ca
> www.merlin.mb.ca


-- 
I tried to build a better future, a few times:
https://wayforward.archive.org/?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.icei.org

Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC