Unreliable internet connectivity

[GS3]

I do not know what the Internet Connectivity Monitor does exactly but I generally have unreliable internet connectivity and for years I have been running "ping" automatically in a command line terminal and it lets me know when the connection is slow or dead. I do this in Linux as well as Windows and it is simple and effective.

Code: Select all

ping 8.8.8.8

[gm10]

I do not know what the Internet Connectivity Monitor does exactly but I generally have unreliable internet connectivity and for years I have been running "ping" automatically in a command line terminal and it lets me know when the connection is slow or dead. I do this in Linux as well as Windows and it is simple and effective.

Code: Select all

ping 8.8.8.8

Hammering google's DNS every second on a permanent basis? I'm surprised their firewall doesn't auto-block you. I know many that would. At least set a few seconds -i interval, although why not just add a network speed applet to show your actual throughput rather than some artificial ICMP RTT to Google's DNS? I know every desktop environment has one available in the default list.

[ginahoy]

I do not know what the Internet Connectivity Monitor does exactly but I generally have unreliable internet connectivity and for years I have been running "ping"

I only load ICM when the internet goes down. I set it to check every couple of minutes so I'll know when it's back up again. It pings a website of my choice. I have it ping my own site hosted elsewhere. Or I could set it to google.com or any other site. It reports "Not Connected" or "OK" after each attempt in a scrollable window within the UI. It play a .wav file the first time it's unable to connect (or every time, although that would be annoying!).

I'd prefer that it would alert me when the internet connection is restored. I can't believe the author didn't provide that option! I already know when it's down.

[GS3]

Hammering google's DNS every second on a permanent basis? I'm surprised their firewall doesn't auto-block you. I know many that would. At least set a few seconds -i interval, although why not just add a network speed applet to show your actual throughput rather than some artificial ICMP RTT to Google's DNS? I know every desktop environment has one available in the default list.

I find it amusing that anyone would think that pinging Google's DNS server, or indeed any other server, would put it under any stress or load. I mean, really? It's not like there's a guy there answering my pings manually. (At least I hope not.)

I have been doing this for many years and it works well to tell me how my internet connection is going. I use and have used different servers depending on conditions and I have never had a problem. If I am videoconferencing with Japan then I would ping a server in Japan, etc.

Right now I have half dozen computers running and in a corner of the screen I can see their pings going. It starts automatically when the computer boots up and it is simple and effective. When I see pings being dropped or latency starts to increase then I can close down some programs that are less important and give more bandwidth to those with higher priority.

[gm10]

I find it amusing that anyone would think that pinging Google's DNS server, or indeed any other server, would put it under any stress or load. I mean, really? It's not like there's a guy there answering my pings manually. (At least I hope not.)

I find it amusing that you find it amusing because it's a real thing:

What is a Ping (ICMP) flood attack?

A ping flood is a denial-of-service attack in which the attacker attempts to overwhelm a targeted device with ICMP echo-request packets, causing the target to become inaccessible to normal traffic. When the attack traffic comes from multiple devices, the attack becomes a DDoS or distributed denial-of-service attack.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddo ... os-attack/

I'm not saying your 1-second pings will cause DoS on their own, but it's a common attack pattern and hence my surprise you didn't get auto-blocked. No matter the actual impact, you are abusing their server and network resources.