Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

Wed Feb 9 16:19:58 UTC 2022

On Wed, Feb 09, 2022 at 05:02:01PM +0200, Mark Tinka wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2/9/22 16:53, ??ukasz 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.

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.

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.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way
through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that
democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov