Re: Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

[Kord Martin <kord () firstnationscable com>]

On 2022-02-11 10:11 a.m., Mike Hammett wrote:
> A system always checking to see if "Internet" is up is different than 
> "I think something is wrong, let me check".

Yeah. I've had ping tests fail in false-positive and false-negative 
scenarios and the take away isn't that there IS a problem, but rather an 
investigation should probably take place. I don't think anybody here is 
trying to argue that pings (or DNS lookups) are an infallible 
reachability index for "the internet".


When it comes to customers, ping tests are a non-issue because the 
complaint is normally that YouTube, Facebook, or whatever service isn't 
available and therefore the "internet is down". At some point you have 
to weight the cost/benefit of explaining to customers that the internet 
is a large collection of interconnected networks and not some "cloud" 
that we tap into. It is a series of tubes after all.


K