[ih] Secret precedence schemes back then

[David Mills]

Scott,

There were three reasons for the secret. First, Steve and I felt that 
the emergency provions would be provoke controversy and and pit one side 
of the community against the other. Second, I had a rather poor 
reputation with Cornell for fiddling with the critters without extensive 
testing, which was really hard to do as we had no backroom equivalent 
network. Third, I was sleeping next to a telephone for most of two years 
and getting weary of tiny pipes flooded with nine-ton gorillas.

I have to admit to a couple of other crimes as well, incluiding a nasty 
scheme that the telcos call "call gapp". The scheme was designed 
according to a fairness principle bassed on the total amount of queued 
data for each IP source address. This determined whether a new packet 
was dropped or an old one was preempted.  It was intended to get even 
more nasty should the perp fail to moderate traffic when confronted with 
an ICMP source quench, but so far as I knew, nobody but the Fuzzballs 
actuall responded to source quencn.

I bet nobody even now responods to a source quence.

Scott Brim wrote:

>Excerpts from David Mills on Tue, Jan 27, 2009 04:17:21PM +0000:
>  
>
>>Mathias,
>>
>>Busted after all these years. In the bad old NSFnet days the interactive  
>>customers were being crushed by other traffic, so I modifed the  
>>scheduling algorithm to implement a classic precedence scheme using the  
>>IP header TOS field. Then, I changed NTP to use the highest priority and  
>>telnet to use the next highest. Steve Wolff and I agreed to do thes as  
>>an emergency measure and to keep it a secret ftom the Cornell operators.  
>>I never told anybody and I don't think Steve did either, so somebody  
>>else figured it out. If you look closely at my SIGCOMM paper you can  
>>probably figure it out, too.
>>
>>23 years after the crime, it is past the statute of limitations.
>>
>>Dave
>>    
>>
>
>Dave, we at Cornell learned it from you when the fuzzballs were still
>in operation (but I didn't tell anyone else).  I couldn't understand
>why you thought it needed to be kept secret.  
>
>Scott
>  
>