[atlas] Atlas anchors as ping targets

Hi,

I have a question about using Atlas anchors for a special purpose. Is the following acceptable, or would people have objections to the following idea?

TL;DR: Is it OK to use Atlas anchors as random ping targets?

Over in IETF-land we are (again) debating how to make IPv6 multi-provider multihoming work properly. There's a scenario description and picture at https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/6.%20Management%20and%20Operations/Multi-prefix%20operation.md

One unsolved problem is that if one provider fails, many client applications may continue to use a source address belonging to that provider, instead of switching to a source address belonging to the other provider.

One approach to solving this without any changes except in the host is to magically deprecate failing source addresses until they work again. One approach to that is a pure hack - a program that runs in the background pinging a remote target from various source addresses, to deprecate and undeprecate them as appropriate.

There's code at https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/deprecator.py.
This is experimental software that might disturb network access.

Would it be OK to choose the probe target by picking an Atlas anchor at random? (I have running code for that, but will not post it to github if there are objections.)

I am quite sure that this code is only of interest to a few IPv6 geeks.

It could of course be instrumented for measurement purposes, but multihomed sites of this kind are so rare that I don't think there would be much to measure.

Regards
     Brian Carpenter