[LON-CAPA-admin] Not finding hosts

[Martin Siegert]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 01:30:19PM -0400, Guy Albertelli II wrote:
> Hi Todd,
> 
> > I requested that IT open up ping from our lon-capa server, and they
> > apparently did so.  The script now finds distro.ibiblio.org, but cannot
> > seem to find the install.lon-capa.org, or mirror.pa.msu.edu.
> > 
> > Several questions:  (1) do other people see problems with
> > install.lon-capa.org and mirror.pa.msu.edu?
> 
> I believe msu is filtering ICMP request currently.
> 
> I need to modify CHECKRPMS to stop doing this I guess.
> 
> > (2) If not, what other services does lon-capa use that might cause
> > failure at the msu sites, but success in connecting to
> > distro.ibiblio.org?
> 
> Only CHECKRPMS uses ping/ftp to check if it can find a host.

Just my $0.02:

If you want to continue doing this, why not probe whether the ftp service
is available. That's what you care about, not ping responses
(SFU is blocking pings as well and after the latest onslaught of worms
you'll have a hard time to convince sysadmins to reenable those).
Therefore:

# nmap -sT -p 21 -PT install.loncapa.org

Starting nmap V. 3.00 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on zaphod.lite.msu.edu (35.8.63.51):
Port       State       Service
21/tcp     open        ftp                     

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1 second

is really what you want to do.

Martin