Google peering pains in Dallas

Thu Apr 30 18:41:38 UTC 2020

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 2:39 PM Aaron C. de Bruyn <aaron at heyaaron.com> wrote:
>
> Why isn't there a well-known anycast ping address similar to CloudFlare/Google/Level 3 DNS, or sorta like the NTP project?
> Get someone to carve out some well-known IP and allow every ISP on the planet to add that IP to a router or BSD box somewhere on their network?  Allow product manufacturers to test connectivity by sending pings to it.  It would survive IoT manufacturers going out of business.
> Maybe even a second well-known IP that is just a very small webserver that responds with {'status': 'ok'} for testing if there's HTTP/HTTPS connectivity.
>

It sounds like, to me anyway, you'd like to copy/paste/sed the AS112
project's goals, no?

> -A
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 10:10 AM William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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? ;)