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

[Mark Tinka]

On 2/9/22 21:10, Jeff Shultz wrote:

> 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.

Completely agree.

Unfortunately, most users tend to respect and trust the content services 
they use more than their ISP.

We see it all the time, not just with ping, but even with our on-net 
service assurance systems vs. some far-away "speedtest.net" box.

Mark.