Posted by jgx0 23 hours ago
Also open-source and self-hostable: https://github.com/httptoolkit/testserver. Lots of other endpoints too, full docs here: https://testserver.host/
> This is not a service; avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.
I caught it in review but thousands of others won't.
That ship has sailed I would say.
It's a shame that we don't have any standards for the concerns of canonically testing Internet reachability and for authoritatively redirecting network users to a captive payment portal (without having to resort to ugly hacks that often break with TLS).
But even just having an RFC to yell about is great, thank you :)
So yeah I would pick something simpler for a network access test probably?
It's a static page that every Apple device relies on saying only:
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Success</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>Success</BODY></HTML> ~$ ping -c1 1.1
PING 1.1 (1.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=7.89 ms
--- 1.1 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.888/7.888/7.888/0.000 msAs an example, depending on "man -w" not outputting anything to stderr: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...
We removed the version and a few customers complained we broke their stuff.
Our back clapping was interrupted by an angry customer phone call. One of our customers had gotten access to our internal schema and had a massive reporting setup in Access solving most of his needs.
I ended up converting his reports using some internal tools we had. Customers will grab anything to give them.
[The caliber and depth of his reports were such I wish we would have bought them instead of making me spend months building out our own reports.]
Learning from customers is some of the best learning you can do. :)
This is probably an even more important principle in the age of LLMs.
Also as a _long_ list of other specialist TLS endpoint configurations if you're interested, which can be arbitrarily combined, see https://testserver.host/#tls-endpoints.
That gives neat tricks like https://tls-v1-2--expired--incomplete-chain--http2.testserve...: only accepts TLS 1.2, then sends an expired certificate but fails to send the intermediate cert for the chain (so the client must infer it) and then negotiates HTTP/2 for the connection on top. Fun!
The web page at example.com is maintained as a courtesy by IANA in order to explain the purpose of the example.com domain to wayward humans.
In the nomenclature of RFC 2119, one MUST NOT design computer systems that rely on the correct operation of an HTTP server at that domain. [0] Plus, it's _really_ rude to pound on a small-scale service being provided as a courtesy... go hit the home page of a tech megacorp (such as Microsoft or Google) or the status page for a major CDN (such as Cloudflare or Akamai) instead!
[0] I expect that someone here will want to pop up with a "gotcha" where they say something like "Oh, but IANA's email says that automated use is strongly recommended against, rather than prohibited and besides, they can't actually stop me from doing it!". To that, I reply "Sure, and standards-writers can't actually stop implementers that do the profoundly antisocial thing and do the things they MUST NOT. As any adult who's been paying attention to the world around them throughout their lives knows, there's only so much you can do to stop people who are very determined to be enormous assholes.".
Would you settle for any old static page served by Cloudflare? For instance, example.com? https://bgp.tools/dns/example.com
Maybe Cloudflare gives them a good rate, or is donating service, but it's also possible or even likely that IANA is just using Cloudflare as a vendor, and therefore is paying for all the traffic, which is why they don't want people relying on it or hammering it all the time
In the nomenclature of RFC 2119, one MUST NOT design computer systems that rely on the correct operation of an HTTP server at [example.com.] Plus, it's *_really_* rude to pound on a small-scale service being provided as a courtesy.Much too big for metered data, full of ads, and importantly they all mandate HTTPS these days, which breaks my use case of forcing a captive portal on paid/login-gated Wi-Fi to render.
example.com is (unfortunately for the IATA) the almost perfect "can I reach the Internet" service: It's unlikely to go away, supports HTTP, is fairly small, easy to remember, and I don't care if a captive portal poisons my DNS cache with a fake response temporarily.
/s
Yes, I know it's not the example.com's fault, and it's a side effect of Hyrum's Law:
> This is not a service, avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.
Don't we all have a few fragile tests?
I went and checked and in fact it is already serving a script s.js so I guess you’re right!
Just before COVID, a random unidentifiable person reported that 1.1.1.1 saw 60Mb/s of ICMP echo traffic. When APNIC first experimented with making it a valid network almost a decade before that, it was being sent 50Mb/s of general IP traffic. Amusingly, a side-effect of what CloudFlare has done is that it has stopped all of that traffic leaving the edges of the Internet, and funnelling in to one big central place.
There are those who remember the risks of 'just use 1.1.1.1' and how the people who did that used be characterized as 'bad Internet citizens'. The ServerFault answer (q.v.) is from 2011.
* https://labs.ripe.net/author/franz/pollution-in-18/
Likely for good reason, even back then there would have bound to be lots of misconfigured endpoints trying to access 1.1.1.1, so just blocking it at the earliest point possible kept at lot of the annoyance away. Nowadays, it’s an anycast address, so it’s slightly less bad.
But for me, old habits die hard.
Pinging such an address is inherently a troublesome practice. This address, like many public DNS servers (resolvers as well as root and authoritative ones), uses "anycast" routing methodology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast
Pinging an anycast address will yield a cornucopia of different results. Of course, people who naïvely "ping" a recognizable or easy-to-type IPv4 address get what they deserve, especially when they enshrine it into software, unit tests, or the LLM coughs up such tokens on their behalf.
Fundamentally, the question is "what do you really want to test?" by pinging a particular IPv4? Do you want to test Layer 3 connectivity? Test your ISP's backbone and connectivity? Test only your upstream router? Test the existence of ICMP in your stack and theirs?
... the possibilities are endless. Your router can do anything. Ping zombo.com.
Pinging a domain name could fail for a variety of other reasons, particularly if it's not a reliable site. Cloudflare's business is being reliable; few sites would be a better choice.
But it’s a good “is traffic making it past my router with some semblance of connectivity” sanity check, and easier than finding the provider-side next hop address.
I don't think people are using `ping 1.1.1.1` as a stable API, rather as a yes/no test of the network segment that they control.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1672338/how-to-sleep-for...
The thread you linked to suggests 'timeout'[0]
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
Look what happened because of what you did, what it led to! Two microservices are in critical condition and you're laughing. You're laughing.
Looks like they removed this and instead just show all languages with no CSS animation now.
It still probably is as it is now. But there's better arguments to support localization than transitions.
Well, no. The purpose of the redesign is to move as much of the page content as possible into an external javascript file. There's no question of what parts of the page require javascript; the question is what parts of the page can be moved into javascript.
IANA's email about why example.com changed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915060 - Sept 2026 (20 comments)
McCarthy of DebugBear clearly noticed this admonition and perhaps the mistake as well, because they have carefully highlighted "example.com" without linking to it, although they apparently have visited the site in order to copy and cite screenshots and unpack the CSS, and describe an extensive history of it.
Ultimately, the example.com domain is just there so you can use it in documentation or code examples. Your expectation about the actual example.com domain should basically be none at all, maybe with the exception that it's hopefully not doing actively malicious things like serving malware or running a catchall mailbox feeding spammers.
Whatever HTML they server or if they serve anything at all... shouldn't matter.
I am devastated.
data:text/html,<body%20bgcolor="white">I kinda expected this to be Ford Model T "Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black" joke.
(I actually tried the select, share [sic], open in browser route, but for some reason I only saw opera as an option, not chrome, the browser I actually use for everything. Links still rule.)
I guess this is also done to prevent bad actors from abusing the fact that this domain is hit by people who might not know what they're doing (the ones copy-pasting code without reading it)
> Someone else could
When you own a domain, you can choose not to serve anything on HTTP/S, and still nobody can come and serve some other website on your domain, because they don’t control the DNS records.
I remember getting my start with web development by simply reading the source code of sites I found interesting and trying to recreate them. example.com isn't exactly very interesting but it feels like compressing the HTML isn't in the spirit of things either.
On a side note I'd love to see how complicated (or maybe simple) the hosting setup for this site actually is behind the scenes.
But beyond that, what are you referring to as compression? When I look at the source I see a VERY short easily human-readable HTML page. It doesn't have newlines, but I wouldn't consider that compression. It also references a short, but non-obfuscated javascript file at https://example.com/s.js .
Maybe I misunderstood what you're referring to...
separate shower thought: Microsoft have used contoso.com as the example domain in their docs for 25+ years. I bet the logs for that domain are absolutely wild.