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

Sat Oct 27 02:09:02 UTC 2001

> 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).

Ok.. I'm guilty of this as well, in fact my 'network watcher' sent
a single ping to www.yahoo.com every 15 minutes until your post. 
I just turned it off. 

Now, here's a real issue, many of us probably have similiar systems
that ping upstream connections and page/alert/log when there are
problems. My 'watcher' could also grab a web page (checking port 80)
or do other tests, but I have always assumed that the ping was the least
amount of traffic easily and reliably sent to check connectivity. 

Whats the best way to monitor upstream connectivity for this purpose?