FidoNews wrote:

Recently there was a discussion about supporting the @REPLYTO kludge
in PING robots. It did not convince me that supporting this non
standard kludge in PING robots is a good idea, but it did inspire me
to do a survey of what is around in Fidonet regarding PING.

All recently Synchronet BBS's should support PING. I assked Digital Man to add support a couple of years ago maybe. I expect a numebr of sysops are not even aware. I don't even know if I have the PING flag, but I'll check later and I can always get it added. I have found it a somewhat useful tool in debugging some issues in getting messages from A to B.

Maybe you could try sending a PING to the entire nodelist and see what shakes out.

Now as for TRACE, I've never heard of this one so will have to research it a bit.
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Michiel wrote:

Hello Nigel,

On Monday February 15 2021 16:08, you wrote to FidoNews Robot:

All recently Synchronet BBS's should support PING. I assked Digital
Man to add support a couple of years ago maybe. I expect a numebr of sysops are not even aware. I don't even know if I have the PING flag,

You do not fly the PING flag in today's nodelist but I have tested your system and it does indeed supports PING. Good ;-)

I know.

So maybe you should ask your NC to have the PING flag added.

I did, yesterday. He'll get to it when he has power.

Maybe you could try sending a PING to the entire nodelist and see what shakes out.

Hmmm.. I think that would be a bit too much. Systems that fly the PING flag can be considered to have an open invitation to test it but we know that long toes are not uncommon in Fidonet. So some not flying a PING flag may consider it mildly annoying if their logs are contaminated by unsollicited PING attempts...

I wish PING attempts was all I had to worry about. If any sysop is concerned about PING attempts, then they must have a rather cozy life.

Now as for TRACE, I've never heard of this one so will have to
research it a bit.

TRACE is part of the PING specs, but not all PING implementationes support it. My test indicates that your system does not support TRACE.

I thought as much. I don't know if Digital Man would implement it or not,
maybe if enough people asked for it.
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Nigel,

All recently Synchronet BBS's should support PING. I assked Digital Man
to add support a couple of years ago maybe.

It's so easy to add with a tracker ...

\%/@rd

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