Today minecraft was down at exactly the moment when I wanted to take a break from studying for my finals. A harrowing experience! So I thought I would procrastinate a bit by writing a script that would ping minecraft.net every minute, and launch minecraft for me as soon as things were back to normal. As a proof of concept I ran ping -i 60 -f www.minecraft.net
for a while and observed the output. That command sends a ping every 60 seconds (-f is the 'flood ping' option on my system).
Then it occurred to me: is this OK? I grepped about the man pages, and googled around the interweb, but aside from one illustrated book for children I could find no good advice for how to ping politely.
So I put it to you, gentle super users: what are some general guidelines for using ping politely? Is there a permissible interval for using ping -f
?
-f
is the parameter for "Set Don't Fragment flag in packet (IPv4-only)".