Hello! I’m trying to ping some lemmy instances to understand which one is the faster, so I’m just using the ping command:
$ ping lemmy.ml
PING lemmy.ml (54.36.178.108) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from lemmy.ml (54.36.178.108): icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=24.4 ms
ping lemmy.world
PING lemmy.world (135.181.143.230) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from static.230.143.181.135.clients.your-server.de (135.181.143.230): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=58.2 ms
but if I try with certain instances:
ping vlemmy.net
PING vlemmy.net (109.78.160.70) 56(84) bytes of data.
it just hangs there, forever. if I try to ctrl+C it, it displays
^C
--- vlemmy.net ping statistics ---
13 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 12267ms
why does this happens? I can perfectly visit vlemmy.net from my browser so I really can’t understand whay is this happening
One possibility is that the server is configured not to respond to pings
what advantages can derive from this?
Prevents some types of port scanning normally. Don’t know about other advantages
ICMP is one vector of a distributed denial of service attack. Also, even if not denying the service, it puts load on the network interfaces / routers of that server - everything behind the first firewall / router layer that would otherwise block the ICMP requests.
There’s a firewall blocking ICMP echo-reply requests on the other end. It’s totally normal for servers to block ping requests.
ping nowadays is overrated anyway. If a server responds to ICMP and how fast it does it does not really say much about “how fast” a website is. It only tells you that a) ICMP requests and responses are not blocked and b) how fast ICMP requests get answered.
That’s it. It may not even tell you that a website is online because a load balancer may be responding to the ICMP request while the hosts behind it are offline.
People value ping responses way too highly.
httping may be a better tool to measure “how fast” a website is responding.
Also every major browser has a tool for timing and seing how long a site and it’s components load. You could test it with that but even then; load times will vary slightly depending on what the instances have to load.
But probably a better way than pings ¯_(ツ)_/¯
ICMP echo requests/responses may be blocked - usually by a remote endpoint firewall.
