Google peering pains in Dallas

William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson at gmail.com
Thu Apr 30 17:08:40 UTC 2020


On 4/29/20 8:53 PM, Christopher Morrow wrote:
> I suppose it's time for a more public:
>    "Hey, when you want to test a service, please take the time to test
> that service on it's service port/protocol"
> 
> Testing; "Is the internet up?"
> by pinging a DNS server, is ... not great ;(
> I get that telling 'joe/jane random user' this is hard/painful/ugh...
> :( (haha, also look at cisco meraki devices!! "cant ping google dns,
> internet is down")
> 
> Sorry :(
> 
Just as an anecdote: once upon a time I had a television that began
reporting it couldn't work anymore, because the Internet was down.

After resorting to packet tracing, discovered that it was pinging
(IIRC) speedtest.napster.com to decide.  Napster had gone belly-up.

Fortunately, it had a 2 year warranty, took it back to Best Buy
with about a month to go.

Now think about the hundreds of thousands of customers who didn't
know how to diagnose the issue, or the warranty had expired, and
had to buy a new smart TV?

Tried to get the FTC interested, no joy.  Congress made noises
about passing a law requiring software updates (especially for
security issues), but still nothing on that either.

Besides, what are we going to do after Google goes belly-up? ;)



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