Pinging Yahoo! (WAS: Getting hacked by Digital Isle?)

Fri Oct 26 20:37:53 UTC 2001

At 09:39 AM 10/26/2001 -0700, Grant A. Kirkwood wrote:

 >Personally I find it annoying when some firewall administrator starts
 >blocking icmp. First thing I do when I've got a new router up is ping
 >yahoo.com. If a customer experiences connectivity issues... try pinging
 >yahoo.com. That gives me somewhere to start.

It is interesting to note that Yahoo! presented @ NANOG a couple days ago 
they were getting XX Mbps (15? I forget) of ICMP traffic.  They mentioned 
they could use this data in a decision whether to considering limiting ICMP 
(without actually saying they were considering limiting ICMP).

Yahoo! has been relatively good to the Internet community, and making them 
pay for random tests seems to be a bit less than polite, IMHO.

Perhaps we should pick something else to ping, something that is relatively 
ubiquitous, something that everyone knows, something that should be up all 
the time, something that has good connectivity, something that everyone 
here would not mind sending random packets for random reasons ....

Yes, I think we all came to the same conclusion.  From now on, everyone 
should ping www.microsoft.com to test connectivity. :)

 >If Yahoo started blocking icmp, I'd imagine there'd be hordes of
 >engineers kicking themselves, doing 'sh run' over and over looking for
 >something wrong.

Personally, I would ping my upstream and/or some other location on the 'Net 
if XXX did not respond before I did "sho run".  But that's me. :)

 >Grant

--
TTFN,
patrick