Increasingly, Internet service providers are getting into the habit of filtering ICMP ECHO packets. The reasoning is something to the effect of: "Two widespread worms happen to use pings prior to probing. By blocking pings, we can reduce infection and thus save money. Since our goal is to save money, this is what we will do. 98% of our customers use the Internet only to browse the plethora of HTTP servers running on port 80, and thus ping is not a vital part of our business model." Sure, this sucks. It breaks path MTU discovery; it makes diagnosing network errors difficult. But not everyone is in control of the upstream routers. For example, you will not hear from cassandra or serifos. I wish that this were not the case, but the fascists who run the upstream connection from the particular network on which those two machines lie follow the sort of braindead reasoning I outlined in the first paragraph. I apologize on their behalf, and frankly I am a bit embarrassed by their behavior. But as I said earlier, there is nothing that I can do. Geoff On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 01:50:49PM +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote: > Hi, > > I've setup a smokeping on seppia, which will chart the RTT from tor26 to > your Tor node. > > So if you're seeing a couple of pings every few minutes that's me. > > If you block icmp pings, please don't :) > > The results can bee seen at > http://seppia.noreply.org/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi?target=Tor > > -- > Peter
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