(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>