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

[Jeff Shultz]

This is sort of silly, and thank you Grant for pointing that out. Each ISP
ought to have, within their network/ASN/segment of network that does not
involve traversing the internet, at least one reliably pingable box,
whether it be a gateway router or an odd jobs server sitting on your
backbone.

Not until you can demonstrate that the customer's connection to your
network is up and running do you have any business thinking about pinging
some box out on the internet somewhere. And I'm going to guess that if your
network's connection to the wider internet goes down, you're going to know
about it very soon, and you won't have to try and ping 8.8.8.8 to
demonstrate it.

And after you prove that your customer can ping your internal box by IP,
then you can have them try it by DNS name. Then, and only then, do you need
to try and test connectivity to the wider internet. I personally like news
sites like CNN or Fox News, since they change all the time and are unlikely
to be cached by the customer's web browser. They're also likely to be
CDN'd to somewhere nearby.

This is reminding me of my early days in tech support where if a customer
couldn't access their #emailprovider for some reason, "the internet was
down."

On Wed, Feb 9, 2022 at 10:39 AM Grant Taylor via Outages <
outages at outages.org> wrote:

> On 2/8/22 11:46 PM, Mark Tinka via Outages wrote:
> > You mean like PMTUd, and such :-)?
>
> Not what I originally meant, but sure.
>
> > We probably won't get that one back, and unless we do something,
> > inability to ping 8.8.8.8 will result in unnecessary NOC tickets
> > claiming "the Internet is down".
>
> Probably some, for a while.  (See more below.)
>
> > Yes, this helps Google not having to deal with the problem, but it
> > passes the burden both to the ISP who has to explain why the Internet is
> > now down, and to some other online service who now has to sink ping
> > traffic. Perhaps Yahoo will pick that priviledge up again, like they did
> > back in the day :-(...
>
> So ... an end user education issue.
>
>   - No, the Internet is not down.
>   - The specific test you are doing is (now) bad (for reasons).
>   - See how your $StreamingServiceVideo is still playing?  --  Did you
> receive the test email I just sent you?
>
> The Internet is /up/.
>
> Who should be responsible for an ISP's user base?  I'd naively think
> that the ISP should be responsible for their own user base.  Why should
> we foist this responsibility off onto another organization?
>
>

-- 
Jeff Shultz

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