[ih] Failures of the early Internet

[Vint Cerf]

While I don't remember this specific incident it sounds authentic (I often
write down action items to remember them).
It may be that I was intending to move into an operation posture, in which
case I would want the same division that was monitoring the Arpanet IMPs to
be monitoring the gateways.

v


On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 5:55 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 9:20 PM Jack Haverty wrote:
>
>     > Anybody else have recollections of early failures...?
>
> This may not be the _kind_ of failure you're thinking of, but I remember
> one...
>
> We had just brought up the first ARPANET-connected gateway at MIT, and we
> needed to let the BBN 'core' gateways (I forget what the jargon name for
> them
> was at that point) know where MIT (net 18.) was connected, now.
>
> So, I got a copy of the GGP spec (IEN-30, or IEN-109), but I was too
> busy/lazy to do a full implementation of GGP - I just typed in (in octal!)
> a
> 'routing update' packet that showed MIT-GW as connected to net 18, along
> with
> a few lines of code to send a copy, once a minute, to a list of gateways on
> the ARPANET (here:
>
>   GWTAB:.BYTE   12,3,0,50               ; BBN
>         .BYTE   12,2,0,31               ; CSS-GATEWAY
>         .BYTE   12,1,0,24               ; DCEC
>         .BYTE   12,3,0,110              ; RCC-GATEWAY
>
> is a copy of a later version of the table). I loaded this in to the MIT-GW,
> started it up - but it didn't seem to be working.
>
> Shortly thereafter, IIRC, I got a call from someone at BBN, saying
> something
> like 'are you sending us GGP packets?' Apparently all their gateways had
> crashed - after they got my routing update.
>
> It turns out they had changed the format of routing updates - but nobody
> had
> gotten around to updating the GGP documentation. So I had been sending them
> old-format routing updates - which gave the BBN gateways indigestion.
>
> I remember that at the next Internet meeting, I wound up telling Vint this
> story (probably because somebody had been giving me grief about 'crashing
> all
> the BBN gateways'), and he got this look on his face, and pulled out his
> little 'things to do' notebook and wrote something in it.
>
> We were later speculating that he'd written down 'fire Div 6' (or Div 4 -
> whichever one it was that Ginny worked for), because shortly thereafter, it
> was announced that Div 6 (or Div 4, whichever one it used to be) would be
> replaced by the other one in running the BBN gateways. I have no idea if
> there's any truth to that, but the change was made shortly afterwards!
>
>         Noel
>
> PS: A later version of the offending code still exists; here:
>
>   http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/gw/conf/sbr/route-1.mac
>
> if anyone is interested. Note that the update format there is _not_ the one
> in IEN-109! :-)
>


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