Re: Authoritative Resources for Public DNS Pinging

[Matthew Walster <matthew () walster org>]

(as posted to outages)

On Wed, 9 Feb 2022, 04:53 Mark Tinka, <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:

> It is clear that a number of Internet users find pinging "reliable" IP
> addresses useful, regardless of whether it actually is or isn't, or
> whether it's ethical or not.
>
> Like we have done with other public services such as NTP, perhaps it's
> time we developed some infrastructure for this, so that folk can have
> something reliable to ping that was built for purpose, and also release
> the Google's and Yahoo's of the world from having to bear the brunt of
> such.
>
> Certainly, trying to get people to stop pinging is not going to work.
> Time to go with the tide, than against it.

Do a DNS query. You don't even have to randomise the id number, just query
for something that will have a small set of results (so, not the root) and
ensure checking is disabled. For 8.8.8.8, I'm guessing "dns.google" is
probably an excellent target.

If you wanted something generic, what about a PTR query for something in
10/8, directed at the AS112 project? That's pretty much the sinkhole that
expects that kind of unwanted traffic...

I bet that within a gnat's crotchet you'll find systemd has adopted that as
a special "liveness" command or something. </snark>

M

>