On 19/09/2013 02:30, Joe Abley wrote:
Google's success with 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 seem to mainly result from customers getting frustrated with flaky ISP resolvers.
Bingo. The merger into TVH saw the DNS servers that had been put into our WiFi config "go away", resulting in all kinds of challenging behaviour. Rather than trying to hunt down the correct name servers, with unpleasant past memories of ISPs running resolving and authoritative on the same servers, I just put in 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. If resolution takes a bit longer, well, big whoop - it's not a critical service. I've actually been surprised at the general hostility in this thread to using pings to 8.8.8.8 as a way to track international connectivity and get a vague idea of latency. I don't happen to "just know" international sites which respond to ping requests, but I've used 8.8.8.8 many times for establishing if a connection can get external ping; it's ISP agnostic, which is great. If people have better destinations for ping monitoring, toss them out there. I can't be the only person in here who isn't running an ISP network but does want to know if their connection to the tubes is working in all directions. As an aside, the TVH DNS server I'm using for ping monitoring to the ISP went away (after first spiking pings to nearly 200ms) for a period last night. 8.8.8.8 works, or your internet doesn't. Mumble mumble flaky ISP resolvers? -- Matthew Poole "The difference between theory and practice is that practice is easier in theory than theory is in practice"