> My un-educated answer: it depends. If the BGP route is the next hop > from the machine sending the ping, then yes, you'll probably need to > restart. The ping instance will continue to want to use the broken > path as its next hop. If, however, you're downstream from the BGP > route (another hop between you and the BGP router) it shouldn't matter > because your machine's next hop wouldn't change. > > Does that describe the behavior you're seeing? Specifically, this is what we have going: A couple school districts use Sonicwall firewalls. The fail-over system does a sustained ping to responder.sonicwall.com. The path it takes 100% of the time always hits northernlights.gigapop.net (146.57.252.194) and another dozen hops after that. The state has been having a lot of difficulty with this hop, because of some major routing changes made by the U of M for traffic destined to Chicago. Almost all of our districts never know there is a problem, because BGP on the state routers finds a better path. However, the two districts (both use sonic) sustained pings insists on using the northernlights hop, thus triggering their fail-over circuit, even though there is not an actual Internet outage. Just trying to come to a definitive reason why this occurs so I can possibly find a fix .