On Wed, 9 Feb 2022 at 22:19, Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:

>> Side note, am I missing something obvious where I can’t just have hardware routers strip ICMP, pipe it separately, put 500 VMs behind 4 vLBs and let the world ping the brains out of it?
>
> Seems like a lot of overhead for zero benefit.

I'm not going to opinion on the quantity of benefits, but this thought
could lend a razor from Occam. NPU based boxes, like JNPR Trio, NOK
FP, Huawei Solar, CSCO Lightspeed et.al. could easily respond to ICMP
echo and TTL exceeded in NPU for microseconds of delay and nanoseconds
of jitter at higher performance and lower cost compared to transing
it, i.e. ping responder would become negative cost. Only reason they
don't is because customers are not asking for it.

Further, we could have a global anycast address, like we already have
for 6to4 relays, where a well-known ping responder exists. And anyone
who welcomes responding to pings, configures this address to all the
device loopbacks which they want to include, advertise those loopbacks
in IGP or iBGP and advertise the /24 aggregate in eBGP.

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  ++ytti