Re: Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

[Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

On 2/8/22 4:13 PM, Mark Delany wrote:
> Hard to disagree with "their network, their rules", but we're talking 
> about an entrenched, pervasive, Internet-wide behaviorial issue.

The entrenched, pervasive, Internet-wide behavior used to be to use any 
convenient SMTP server to relay mail too.

The entrenched, pervasive, <something?>-wide behavior used to be to 
smoke on planes too.

Things change with the times.

> 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.

I'm curious what sort of resources Google, et al., expend responding to 
these types of tests.

> 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?

If ~> when that happens, we'll probably start to see responses for those 
tests too.

> 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.

Though I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it might be easier for 
Google to respond to a full / fat / heavy weight HTTP GET / POST that 
includes an actual search than it is to respond to an ICMP ping.  As if 
their network magic is a LOT more efficient / better scaled for HTTP 
than it is for ICMP.  <ASCII shruggie>

> 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?

Time will tell.



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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