(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 >
