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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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                    A PING robot survey
                    By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555


Recently there was a discussion about supporting the @REPLYTO kludge
in PING robots. It did not convince me that supporting this non
standard kludge in PING robots is a good idea, but it did inspire me
to do a survey of what is around in Fidonet regarding PING.

For starters: PING is not all that popular. Nodelist.043 shows 57
nodes flying the PING flag, but if AKAs are removed only 31 unique
sytems remain. There are two systems flying the PING flag in the Z2
pointlist.

So my first step was to query all these 31 systems for a ping res-
ponse. This took a bit of patience because even in the age of Fido
over IP, some take up to a day to respond. Of the 31 tested, 7 did
not respond. Of these 7, 4 nodes appear to be down. The other 2 have
the node up and accepting calls but there seems to be no active PING
robot. 1 is a Pvt node who's status I was unable to determine.

The 2 systems in the pointlist that fly a PING flags are responding.

So far so good.

The next step was to test if the PING nodes always answer from the
address that is pinged. Many do. E.g. 2:280/0 answers from 2:28/0
and 2:280/5555 answers from 2:280/5555. But not all do. 1:18/0
answers from the "main AKA" 1:3634/12. Of course I could only test
systems that actually have and are listed with more than one AKA in
the nodelist.

The third and last step was to try to determine if the systems that
support PING also support TRACE. Ik knew that not all do, but nobody
ever bothered to check it. So what I did is send a PING to a node
that has a PING robot up and running and route it through the node
to be tested. If the ping returns and the node or one of its AKAs is
in the VIA's then I knew for sure that it had passed the node under
test. 18 of the nodes supporting PING also support TRACE. 4 nodes
support PING but do not support TRACE. For 2 nodes I was unable to
determine if they support TRACE or not.


So here are the results:


Node nr.      Reply by/        Always answers from addressed AKA
              Status           | Supports Trace
                               | |  AKAs
                               | |  |

1:19/10       Mailguard          Y
1:229/101     Diskshop Tracker N Y  1:12/0 1:12/1

1:320/119     Ping Service     Y Y  1:320/0 1:142/0

1:320/219     Ping Service     Y Y  1:1/19

1:320/319     Ping Service     Y Y  1:1/119

1:3634/12     SBBSecho         N N  1:1/120 18/0 3634/0 3634/12

2:221/1       O/T-Track        N Y  2:221/0 2:221/360

2:221/6       Pong @ hpt         Y

2:2432/200    Pvt, No Reply

2:2432/920    Node Down

2:2448/1021   PING             * N  2:2448/0

2:280/464     Fmail            Y Y

2:280/464.112 Fmail            Y Y

2:280/5555    Fmail            Y Y

2:280/5555.1  Fmail            Y Y

2:292/854     Lord of the Ping N N  2:2/0 2/1000 2/1002 292/80

2:292/8125    Fmail            Y Y  2:29/0

2:460/58      Crazy Mail Robot   Y

2:463/68      Craxy Mail Robot   Y

2:461/79      Node Down

2:463/2223    Ping Robot            2:46/200

2:4642/7      Node Down

2:5019/40     Netmail Daemon   N Y  2:5019/0

2:5020/545    ping.pl            Y

2:5020/601    Node Down

2:5020/846    Ping-Pong Robot

2:5020/1042   RNTrack            Y

2:5020/2065   FTrack

2:5021/46     Candle           Y Y  2:5021/0

2:5053/58     Ping Down

2:5080/102    Ping Down

2:6035/3      Ping Robot         Y

3:712/848     Mailer-daemon    Y Y  3:3/0 3:712/0


* 2:2448/0 is an AKA of 2:2448/1021. But only 2:2448/1021 flies the
PING flag and answers on a PING request.



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