Download sources from servers that don't respond to ping

[Scott Haneda]

I had the misfortune of some bad routes with my colocation provider a  
while back. Traceroute being the main tool I was using. This combined  
with Comcast doing strange things on their routers gave me a chance to  
learn a little more about checking hosts.

Rather than ping, what about "curl --head example.com". Of course you  
can be as specific as you want and attach as deep a URI as you like.

This may not work as I believe it's a port 80 based test and I'm not  
sure what ports need testing. Though if it's using ping, with as  
unreliable as that is, I can't see curl being anything but an  
improvement.

I assume these are rsync servers, or are we talking about the actual  
servers that hold the distro?  In the latter, curl would work perfect,  
in the former, there would be a requirement that http be active. Or  
perhaps curl could be told to hit another port.

Where ping and traceroute fail me for basic up status testing, curl  
with a --head flag always gives me more data, in more detail.

Any reasons this would not be a better approach?
-- 
Scott
Iphone says hello.

On Oct 3, 2009, at 3:18 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>  
wrote:

> This is not perfect because as you say some servers might not  
> respond to pings (though hopefully that's rare), and some servers  
> that respond quickly to pings may not actually be fast at sending  
> the file, but it was easy enough to implement and better than what  
> we had. We're open to suggestions on further improvements for auto- 
> selecting fast download locations.