Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

Wed Feb 9 15:02:01 UTC 2022

On 2/9/22 16:53, Łukasz Bromirski wrote:

> Yup. And Google folks accounted for the world pinging them all day long.
>
> I wouldn't call using DNS resolvers as best "am I connected to internet over this interface" tool though. A day, year or 5 years from now the same team may decide to drop/filter and then thousands of hardcoded "handmade automation solutions" will break. And I believe that's closer to what Masataka was trying to convey.

I get that, but what I'm saying is that users tend to expect things to 
remain the same. In reality, they don't, because as abstract as the 
Internet seems to most users, it is run by actual people, who have to 
apply mind and muscle to not only stand things up, but keep them 
standing. The movement of those people has an impact on that, even in 
very well established institutions.

So unless there is some specific accommodation from Google et al, that 
the servers they run for one service can be used for liveliness 
detection, expect breakage when that changes, at their whim. Until then, 
do not expect users to honour the original intent of the service. If it 
can serve some other purpose (like liveliness detection), they will use 
it for that purpose in the hopes that it will always be there, for that 
purpose.

Mark.