[TriLUG] OT: Amiable ping target

[Brian Henning]

Hi Folks,
   Pardon my ignorance...but is there an IP somewhere out there that is 
specifically set up to be a ping target for checking connectivity? 
We're having some serious issues with our DSL here lately, and I want to 
set up a task to monitor it with pretty high resolution, say, around one 
ping per second (I have a feeling some of its frequent flakings are only 
seconds in length, but enough to interrupt our VPN).

Obviously, doing this sort of thing would require a target (or more 
probably, list of targets) that are highly reliable themselves, to avoid 
false down indications.  So I'd probably create a list of N targets, and 
each would only see a ping from me every N seconds unless one failed, in 
which case the process would ping the next target on the list immediately.

My concern, of course, being a [hopefully] nice little Net citizen, is 
not wanting to irritate anyone by taking about 302kB out of their 
transfer quota every hour (3600 pings * 84 bytes each), unless they're 
intending to be so generous.

In other words, I have a feeling I shouldn't just randomly choose some 
hosts (unless I choose a huge number of them...a possibility).  Hence 
the question.

And as a sideline question, if there's a nice utility out there already 
to do something like that (take a list of hosts and ping one every X 
seconds and report on the success), I'd love to know about it.

Thanks a bunch as always!
~Brian