On 2/9/22 18:19, Joe Greco wrote:
So what people really want is to be able to "ping internet" and so far the easiest thing people have been able to find is "ping 8.8.8.8" or some other easily remembered thing.
Pretty much - both people and "things".
Does this mean that perhaps we should seriously consider having some TLD being named "internet", with maybe a global DNS redirector that lets service providers register appropriate upstream targets for their customers, and then maybe also allow for some form of registration such that if I wanted to provide a remote ping target for AS14536, I could somehow register "as14536.internet" or "solnet.internet"?
Fundamentally, this is a valid issue. As the maintainer of several BGP networks, I can't really rely on an upstream consumer ISP to be the connectivity helpdesk when something is awry. It would really be nice to have a list of officially sanctioned testing points so that one could just do "ping google.internet" or "ping level3.internet" or "ping comcast.internet" or "ping aws.internet" and get a response.
The problem with this is that someone will try to make what could be a relatively simple thing complicated, and we'll end up needing a special non-ping client and some trainwreck of names and other hard-to-grok garbage, and then we're perilously close to coming back to the current situation where people are using arbitrary targets out on the Internet for connectivity testing.
Totally agree - we need to be deliberate about creating something that is not only simple, but memorable, in addition to being built for purpose. But I also agree that this will likely create an opportunity to over-complicate what should be simple. We'll need to put in as much effort into resisting complexity, as we will designing a solution. Mark.