monitoring external internet connectivity

[Jayson Broughton]

I gotta 2nd Marc on that.  We did get permission from our ISP to ping their
network, as we are usually the first to know when one of our 28+ networks go
down in the country :-)  I too would get permission. Because if they don't
know who you are, some attentive little admin at xxxxx site might see your
possibly mis-configured nagios server as a DOS attack against their network
and block you.  Thus leaving you with a false response that your network is
down :-)  Or even if it's not mis-configured, having your server pinging
their server at regular intervals might seem abit off to someone that's
monitoring logs.

Jayson

-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Powell [mailto:marc at ena.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 2:05 PM
To: Nagios Users Mail-list
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] monitoring external internet connectivity


On Jun 30, 2009, at 2:43 PM, shadih rahman wrote:

> All,
>   What is the best way to check if our network has connection to  
> commodity internet or not.  What I am trying to achieve is to ensure  
> internal network has connection to Internet.  One thing is to ping  
> google check.  Is this a good idea or can someone suggest a better  
> way to do this.

It is never a good idea to steal the resources of some third party for  
your own purposes, no matter how infinite you think those resources to  
be. If you and hundreds, thousands or millions of other people all  
think it's just fine to ping Google all the time, Google takes the  
brunt of that resource hit.

I would recommend that you poll your router's snmp tables to get  
interface status (ifStatus, ifOperStatus). Alternately, place a test  
device or purchase a small colo server somewhere outside your network  
that you can use as the target for your tests; or work with someone  
with similar needs to arrange permission to ping devices on each  
other's network.

--
Marc


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