Looking for recommendations for a dedicated ping responder

Sat Sep 10 08:57:50 UTC 2016

On one of these lists around 6 months ago a Google network engineer confirmed they do rate limit icmp (aside from prioritisation).

 Unless there's a real issue here this is more about educating people. It's amazing how many still miss interpret trace routes these days.

Kind regards

James Greig

> On 9 Sep 2016, at 23:29, Jon Lewis <jlewis at lewis.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 9 Sep 2016, Jared Mauch wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sep 9, 2016, at 4:08 PM, Dan White <dwhite at olp.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> We're being caught up in some sort of peering dispute between Level 3 and
>>> Google (in the Dallas area), and we've fielded several calls from larger
>>> customers complaining of 40-50% packet loss (to 8.8.8.8) when there appears
>>> to be no actual service impacting loss.
>>> 
>>> We currently suggest customers use a Linux server to ping against, or
>>> another public host.
>>> 
>>> Ideally we'd like to use a hardware based ICMP system for customer use -
>>> Accedian NIDs are good at this (exceptionally low jitter) accept they
>>> throttle at 500 pings per second.
>> 
>> I know that the NETNOD folks did NTP in a FPGA that can do 4x 10GE,
>> perhaps that card and code could be used to do 40G ICMP responder?
> 
> The trouble is, LOTS of people want to ping something "out on the internet" to verify their connectivity, and things like GOOG's 8.8.8.8 DNS servers are a popular lighthouse.  I know from first hand experience (dealing with customers complaining about it), that GOOG, at least at some of the anycast nodes for the service, polices ICMP echo requests aimed at
> 8.8.8.8 due to the quantity of those unwanted packets.
> 
> Having a cheap/small/powerful device that can be used as a ping target, and getting the masses to use it are two very different things.
> 
> Dan, are your customers missing DNS responses, or just echo replies from 8.8.8.8?  If the latter, ask what they'd do if thousands of people pinged one of their servers constantly.
> 
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> Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
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