FWIW, checkout of these things took 5+hrs, staying on the local
.freebsd.org net w/o hitting the 'net at all.
As promised,
$ time cvs ci
real 67m51.701s
user 0m1.250s
sys 0m5.345s
via icmp status, eg: tcp or udp. It speaks http as well, so it can
"ping" a http server or a http proxy cache to make sure it's operating
and not wedged. (Nearly all of our system lockups are not detected
by icmp pings)