[ih] Fwd: History of "accounts"

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Noel,

The VAN gateway was one of the later additions to the gateway project.   I
don't recall the timing, but by then we probably had the gateways all
managed by the NOC, so there were logs, traps, etc., continuously reporting
operational stats.   Even before the NOC there were mechanisms to watch
what each gateway was doing, and someone (Hinden/Brescia/Sheltzer most
likely) looking every day for issues.   Again, I don't remember the
details, but the VAN gateway would probably have reported data flow every
few minutes, as well as logs of interesting events, like opening/closing an
X.25 connection, including whether we initikated or answered the call.
So, if UCL used a similar algorithm, we would have easily seen it in the
logs.

This is a pragmatic example of "you can't manage what you can't measure".
We measured.  By the mid-80s, the Arpanet had grown to include lots of
operational statistics et al for the NOC operators to use to manage the
net, and the gateways followed the lead with similar mechanisms.

/Jack



On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>wrote:

>     > From: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org>
>
>     > So, the SYN packet of a TCP connection heading to EU from a US
> computer
>     > would get sent and the US would pay for a short, one-packet, X.25
>     > session.
>     > The ACK returning from the EU computer would then open a connection
>     > from the EU side, and, lacking a similar algorithm, subsequent
> packets
>     > for that TCP session, and any others that might subsequently occur
> (FTP
>     > transfers for example) would get billed to the UK.
>
> Err, what makes you so sure they weren't doing the same thing? :-) (I.e.
> opening a connection just for the SYN-ACK, then shutting it down?)
>
>         Noel
>
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