[ih] Global congestion collapse

[Scott W Brim]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 04:37:30AM +0000, David L. Mills allegedly wrote:
> Perry,
> 
> Not so fast. Steve Wolff of NSF and I had a nasty little secret we did 
> not tell the NSFnet maintenance crew who could never keep a secret. I 
> built in priority queueing and preemption in the fuzzball routers. The 
> former wiretapped the telnet port and made it just below NTP on the 
> priority scale. We put mail on the bottom just below ftp. A lot of 
> telnet users stopped complaining because they thought we "fixed" the 
> network.

The news leaked out pretty quickly iirc :-)

Another thing I noticed was that people adjusted their behavior.  The
congestion spread in time when it couldn't spread any other way, and
filled most of the night.