Subject: pinging netiquette

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 20 Feb 2001 11:52:17 +0200

I would like to send series of pings from time to time to some sites
in Israel, for my own nefarious research purposes that are too boring
to expand upon.

I think that I would like to set a series of several hundred pings at
the default ping interval of 1 sec, and probably do that repeatedly,
to sites that are not under my control. I can probably increase the
period to a few seconds, but keep the ping count the same (longer
series).

Will that be regarded as offensive or suspicious by the targets'
sysadmins? Will I get screamed at, blacklisted, banned from the 'net
for life? Are there sites that are more likely than the others to
tolerate this? I thought of academic institutions and fortresses of
liberalism. Any other ideas?

Does anyone on the list host a site (with static IP) and is willing to
be a target of such abuse?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
"... We work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
 And wit depends on dilatory time." [Shakespeare]

---

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 12:23:47 +0200

> liberalism. Any other ideas?

At Mercury, I'm developing web sites monitoring apps, since those apps
needed to be tested, I used to monitor a range of sites that I thought would
never notice the extra load (CNN, yahoo, amazon, etc.)
Wrong bet.
An angry letter from someone to managment, caused an order to be sent out:
"the only sites you can test are mercury's own sites).

Apparently after yahoo got DOSed, they started checking, and found a
suspicious number/frequency of pings from our site.

So, I'd suggest to ask for permissions before pinging, cause you never know
:-)

Thanks,
Chen.