[ih] A laugh and a question

[Louis Mamakos]

I'm pretty certain that the fuzzball PING existed before the PING that
Mike wrote at BRL.  I distinctly remember crashing one of their VAXen on
the eve of the NCP/TCP transition with PING from one of my fuzzballs.
There was a double-free() for the mbuf containing the ICMP echo.  I
don't recall if they were running the BBN stack, or an early 4.1BSD version.

In fact, I crashed it two or three times before I noticed the connection
between my testing activities and er, the failure of my tests.  This I
confirmed in a conversation with Ron Natalie, then of BRL.  "Ron, did
your VAX just crash?  ..uh, yeah, why do you ask?"  This might have been
BRL-VGR, but I might be imagining that.

I also recall testing the ICMP code in the UNIVAC 1100 IP stack Mike
Petry and I wrote during the same time, perhaps during 1981 - 1983, with
the fuzzball PING command as well.

louie


Noel Chiappa wrote:
> Interesting: RFC889 (December 1983) says:
> 
>   Among the various measurement packages is the original PING (Packet
>   InterNet Groper) program used over the last six years for numerous tests
>   and measurements of the Internet system and its client nets. This program
>   contains facilities to send various kinds of probe packets, including ICMP
>   Echo messages, process the reply and record elapsed times and other
>   information in a data file, as well as produce real-time snapshot
>   histograms and traces.
> 
> The date on that RFC is very interesting, because Mike's Ping history page
> (http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html) says:
> 
>   My original impetus for writing PING for 4.2a BSD UNIX came from an offhand
>   remark in July 1983 by Dr. Dave Mills .. in which he described some work
>   that he had done on his "Fuzzball" LSI-11 systems to measure path latency
>   using timed ICMP Echo packets. 
>   In December of 1983 I encountered some odd behavior of the IP network at
>   BRL. Recalling Dr. Mills' comments, I quickly coded up the PING program
> 
> Presumably the work described in RFC889 predates December 1983 (the date on
> the RFC); and that material was also what Mike referred to in his mention of
> "described some work that he had done".
> 
> So your "PING (Packet InterNet Groper)" program predates Mike's, and your use
> of the name is at least contemporaneous, and probably pre-dates, Mike's. You
> don't happen to have any older rough drafts of 889 lying around, do you? If
> so, that could definitively show your use of the term pre-dating Mike's.
> 
> 
> Just out of curiousity, I assume you had the sonar analogy in mind when you
> came up with the backronym (?) "PING (Packet InterNet Groper)"?
> 
> Do you recall if the term "ping" was already in use in the community at the
> time, or was that something you introduced? (I just don't recall, alas!)
> 
> 	Noel
>