[Outages-discussion] [outages] Ping to Google 8.8.8.8

[Matthew Walster]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2022, 06:17 Jay R. Ashworth, <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> Is there a measurable problem from the actual 64 bytes per second of ICMP?
>
> Or is the problem untrained 'engineers' getting all up in their bootstraps
> about "it not working" when they try to do it?
>

As I've recently been informed, certain shipping hardware from a big name
manufacturer does liveness checks every second to 8.8.8.8 via ICMP. It's
gone past diagnostics during a fault, it's now being treated as a public
facility.

What's more, it's being treated as a canonical source of information
despite protests by the people operating the service that happens to give
that side effect, and complaints being raised when it is rate limited due
to abuse.

It doesn't matter what is invented to replace it, "ping 8.8.8.8" is very
fast to type, easy to remember, and is probably going to take the same
amount of time to disappear as people setting 4.2.2.2 as their nameserver
did.

M

>
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