Matthew Poole (matt) writes:
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.
Sorry for jumping late on thread, but there was a good blog article covering this, albeit in French (Google translate to the rescue): http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bortzmeyer.org%2Fque-pinguer.html There are some useful suggestions in there (again, apologies if they have been covered already). Cheers, Phil