Re: Useful ping targets for end-users?

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

On 1/12/22 17:35, Adam Thompson 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.)
>
> 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…

We do not recommend or advise customers to ping random online resources, 
however famous they may be. We don't want to be part of growing that 
problem for other networks.

We do operate a number of FreeBSD servers to capture and share public 
telemetry, and do offer customers the option to ping those, in various 
cities, if they are really keen to. Sometimes they do, other times they 
prefer to ping the famous online addresses.

We only put our name behind the servers we operate. We do not stop them 
from pinging off-net resources, but we make no gurantees as to their 
experience doing that.

Mark.