[dns-operations] Pinging the root name servers to check my connectivity?

[WBrown at e1b.org]

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote on 09/11/2012 08:38:40 AM:

> This leaves out the case of "Mom & Pop monitoring". Of course, my
> employer contracts for reliable monitoring targets. But the small
> SOHO?

I'm reposting something I meant to send to the list, but sent to Stephane 
privately.  He blogged about it at 
http://www.bortzmeyer.org/que-pinguer.html (use Google Translate if 
necessary).

--start quote--
Why not stay closer to "home" and point the test one or two hops upstream?
Generally, the problem is the last mile/kilometer - from your home/office
to the ISP. Depending on your ISP, it should take a major outage to
affect the internet beyond that link.

And you're paying the ISP so they should be somewhat tolerant of you
sending small requests to them.

And perhaps do less frequent tests (10 minutes? 1 hour??) to something
further upstream to test the wider internet. Of course some site might be
reachable, but others down, depending on where the major break was. The
Baltimore, MD train tunnel fire in 2001 (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Street_Tunnel_fire ) caused symptoms
like that for me here in Buffalo, New York.

Of course this scenario is not something a manufacturer like DLink or
Linksys/Cisco can build into a product easily. 
--end quote--



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