Best way to check if there is internet?

[Michael Torrie]

On 2/7/22 12:51, Chris Angelico wrote:
> Some day, we'll have people on Mars. They won't have TCP connections -
> at least, not unless servers start supporting connection timeouts
> measured in minutes or hours - but it wouldn't surprise me if some
> sort of caching proxy system is deployed.
> 
> On the other hand, it also wouldn't surprise me if we do everything at
> a high level instead - have a Martian PyPI mirror, Debian package
> mirror, etc, etc, etc - and then build a mirror synchronization
> protocol that uses UDP.
> 
> Either way, though: would a person on Mars "have the internet"? Yes,
> but not the internet as we know it...

Fun fact.  The team running the Ingenuity helicopter on mars has shell
access to Linux running on the copter.  Obviously not interactive in the
normal sense of course, but they can batch shell commands and pass them
through the communication network to the rover, which relays them to the
copter.  Standard out is relayed back to earth at the next opportunity.
 Currently they use this remote shell access to compress all the images
after each flight and use ffmpeg to create video sequences from stills
on the copter computer itself.  They also used it to do some hacks to
temporarily fix the watchdog timing issue they had initially.  One of
the Linux gurus on the project has given several interviews to the Linux
Unplugged podcast. Fastinating stuff!

It's likely they have a python interpreter onboard as well.