Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

Tue Feb 8 23:29:43 UTC 2022

On Tue, 8 Feb 2022, Christopher Morrow wrote:

> you know what you COULD do though... probe it with DNS requests, and then
> you know, test the service being offered, and still know that 'the internet
> is not on fire'.

  What?!? Use UDP to test the Internet? How would you even know if the
  Internet was fine but some router didn't like how your packet smelled and
  dropped it? ;-)

  Seriously though, if ICMP is becoming the problem this thread seems to
  believe, TCP rather than UDP is probably a better judge of the
  "availability of the Internet" as the remote end is going to attempt to
  respond.

  Though I cannot argue that lack of DNS also can indicate why Chicken
  Little is perturbed.

  I don't have any issues with ICMP generally, though I'm usually sending
  such packets to systems and servers and networks I control or have
  permission/access to.

  For people that don't have access to multiple servers dotted around the
  Internet, is it time for them to move away from ICMP and start using HTTP
  HEAD TCP requests to well-known websites to determine if a route is
  available and functioning? That's a lot more data when multiplied by a few
  million queries per second, just to check that the Internet is up... but
  also less likely to get filtered or throttled to the point where you get
  no response, even though the sky is not falling.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                https://www.angryox.com/
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