Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

Tue Feb 8 23:13:30 UTC 2022

On 08Feb22, Mike Hammett allegedly wrote:

> Some people need a clue by four and I'm looking to build my collection of them. 

> "Google services, including Google Public DNS, are not designed as ICMP network testing services"

Hard to disagree with "their network, their rules", but we're talking about an entrenched,
pervasive, Internet-wide behaviorial issue.

My guess is that making ping/ICMP less reliable to the extent that it becomes unusable
wont change fundamental behavior. Rather, it'll make said "pingers" reach for another tool
that does more or less the same thing with more or less as little extra effort as possible
on their part.

And what might such an alternate tool do? My guess is one which SYN/ACKs various popular
TCP ports (say 22, 25, 80, 443) and maybe sends a well-formed UDP packet to a few popular
DNS ports (say 53 and 119). Let's call this command "nmap -sn" with a few tweaks, shall
we?

After all, it's no big deal to the pinger if their reachability command now exchanges
10-12 packets with resource intensive destination ports instead of a couple of packets to
lightweight destinations. I'll bet most pingers will neither know nor care, especially if
their next-gen ping works more consistently than the old one.

So. Question. Will making ping/ICMP mostly useless for home-gamers and lazy network admins
change internet behaviour for the better? Or will it have unintended consequences such as
an evolutionary adaptation by the tools resulting in yet more unwanted traffic which is
even harder to eliminate?

Mark.