Problem booting after Yum update of FC4

[Tim]

someone suggested:
>> Try "ping google.com" for several hours, and see how many packets you
>> drop.

Tim:
>> I hope you don't mean continuously.  That would constitute abuse.

James Wilkinson:
> That's a fairly harsh definition of abuse you've got.
> 
> They've made the ping service available in the same way as they make the
> HTTP service available. Accessing Google's web pages once a second would
> not be OTT for a suitably busy site.

What makes you think that Google has provided you with a ping responder?
Many systems respond to ping, but that's often a default behaviour, most
of them won't have deliberately provided you with something for doing
ping tests with.  It's a bit like saying most ISPs will let spam through
their systems, so sending spam is okay.

I think that you'd find that many would consider such pinging to be an
abuse of their services, I certainly would.

> Continuous pinging *is* necessary occasionally as a form of network
> diagnostic: it tells the network administrator whether (and in
> conjunction with traceroute, where) to complain about network timeouts.

Fair enough, but do such things with the consent of the equipment
owners.  If you're testing your equipment, do so against someone that
doesn't mind it.

> I selected Google partly because of the size and capacity of their
> servers and network connections.
> 
> I don't think I'm abusing Google. I'm using the facilities they make
> available in the way they're supposed to be used. And I'm not taking
> anywhere *near* unreasonably large amounts of resources to do so.

As before, what makes you think that Google has provided you with a ping
responder for such tests? 

-- 
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