Does Bitbucket reject PING requests?

Question

I have a script that is trying to determine the reachability of Bitbucket. According to https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/troubleshooting-network-issues-389778693.html, Bitbucket should respond to PING requests. However, as of this writing, on multiple networks, I am getting request timeouts. However, Bitbucket is reachable over HTTP, and so forth.

Is this some kind of outage, or a recent change invalidating the troubleshooting tips on the previous link?

Here's the exact output, if it's helpful:

$ ping bitbucket.org

PING bitbucket.org (18.205.93.1): 56 data bytes

Request timeout for icmp_seq 0

Request timeout for icmp_seq 1

Request timeout for icmp_seq 2

^C

--- bitbucket.org ping statistics ---

4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss

Anonymous Coward · Answer

Simon says:

"Indeed the guide says that you *should* be able to ping bitbucket.org. That does not mean that it will always happen and this is why we do not say *must* in the guide.

Please do not rely on ping (or any other ICMP based tool) to tell you reliably if a remote application is reachable.

"

Simon, out.

Andrey Lazuk · Answer

Having the same issue, and the troubleshooting guide STILL says I should be able to ping bibucket.org

Anonymous Coward · Answer

Simon says:

"By reachability of Bitbucket I assume you are interested to determine if the service that Bitbucket offers is reachable.

Ping is not the best tool to use for that for the following reasons:

1. Ping uses ICMP Echo Request/Relpy messages which shows if the remote ICMP implementation is reachable.

2. Bitbucket services are located at the TCP layer while ICMP is located at the IP layer of the TCP/IP stack.

3. ICMP messages can be filtered across the network path by any node on the path, without impacting the services that listen at the TCP layer.

I would recommend using in your script a tool that actually talks to the TCP layer where the services listen. For example netcat [1] can be a good option to do that. The man page [2] shows a lot of examples that you can use.

"

[1] http://netcat.sourceforge.net/

[2] https://linux.die.net/man/1/nc

Simon, out