[ih] 13 the unlucky number
Jack Haverty
jack at 3kitty.org
Thu Aug 13 11:25:58 PDT 2020
I did a little more archeological work....
Yes, IENs 30 and 109 were specs related to the first gateways, written
by Ginny Strazisar. IIRC, they did not include ICMP which came later,
but there was some functionality like Echo datagrams, as well as Routing
exchanges. There was also a project that built and operated the "CMCC"
(Catenet Monitoring and Control Center) which collected a lot of "ping"
type of data. Subsequently we split apart the "gateway-gateway" and
"gateway-host" parts of the control protocol and put the host-related
pieces into ICMP, and created EGP with the notion of "Autonomous
Systems". SNMP was also in the picture at some point. A very vibrant
time....
The "Internet Project" was moved in October 1981 from one piece of BBN
to another, with the goal that the Internet gateways evolve from a
research project into an operational network, run and managed 24x7 along
with the ARPANET and SATNET which had been operating for quite a while
under control of the NOC (Network Operations Center). A lot of the
work in that timeframe was associated with taking the Internet (i.e.,
the "core gateways") into fulltime operation as a communications service.
***** FYI for Internet Historians: *****
The most authoritative records of the early Internet that I've found are
the reports which were submitted to ARPA as contract deliverables, and
which documented what actually happened. Many of them are publicly
accessible from the DTIC (Defense Technical Information Center, at
dtic.mil), although they're not always easy to find.
I've managed to find some of the 1980-1984 reports from BBN (I wrote
some of them); the section on "Internet Development" in each records the
evolution of the "core gateways" during that period. There's also a lot
of detail on other Internet-related ARPA projects (e.g., SATNET,
WidebandNet, Remote Site Maintenance, CMCC) that were parts of the
early Internet but not documented much at all in IENs or RFCs.
Here's a list of what I've found. The "ADxxxxxx" part of the file name
is the DTIC "access number", which will help a lot if you'd like to
retrieve them from DTIC.
BBN4342-QTR16-198002-ADA082618.pdf
BBN4399-QTR17-198005-ADA085807.pdf
BBN4458-QTR-HP3000TCP-198005-ADA086832.pdf
BBN4474-QTR18-198008-ADA089025.pdf
BBN4526-QTR19-198011-ADA093164.pdf
BBN4609-QTR20-198102-ADA096114.pdf
BBN4679-QTR21-198105-ADA100473.pdf
BBN4761-QTR22-198108-ADA104931.pdf
BBN4825-QTR23-198111-ADA108783.pdf
BBN4868-QTR24-198202-ADA112575.pdf
BBN4930-RSM-1982-ADA-112887.pdf
BBN5003-QTR25-198205-ADA115773.pdf
BBN5129-QTR26-198208-ADA119776.pdf
BBN5215-QTR27-198211-ADA122596.pdf
BBN5215-QTR27-198211-ADA222356.pdf
BBN5286-QTR28-198302-ADA125959.pdf
BBN5345-QTR29-198305-ADA129828.pdf
BBN5408-QTR30-198308-ADA132690.pdf
BBN5492-QTR31-198311-ADA136256.pdf
BBN5580-QTR32-198402-ADA145348.pdf
BBN5774-QTR33-198405-ADA147675.pdf
BBN5883-QTR35-198411-ADA151312.pdf
BBN5939-FINAL-198507-ADA157124.pdf
I'm sure there must have been other reports about the early Internet
work, from all the other ARPA contractors, but I haven't had much
success in finding them.
Enjoy,
/Jack
On 8/13/20 8:26 AM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
> Lixia Zhang also wrote a paper entitled "How to Build a Gateway - - C Gateway: An Example". I found a copy at a MIT website. It is dated April 1987 and there is a footnote indicating it is a revised version of a published paper in June 1987. I know I had a copy of that paper ages ago. Perhaps I had an early version because 1987 seems later than when I remember. I don't trust my recollection about that however.
>
> barbara
>
> On Thursday, August 13, 2020, 01:13:39 AM PDT, Vint Cerf via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> Jack, wasn't that
> [2] Strazisar, V., "Gateway Routing: An Implementation Specification,"
> IEN-30, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., August 1979.
> [3] Strazisar, V., "How to Build a Gateway," IEN-109, Bolt Beranek and
> Newman Inc., August 1979.
>
> v
>
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 9:23 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Barbara,
>>
>> AFAIK, there was never a spec for gateway/router behavior, except Ginny
>> Strazisar's very early RFC. However, the behavior of ICMP Echo
>> Request/reply et al was spec'd in RFC 792 in 1981, so the gateway should
>> have been conforming to that. If the destination host was down, it
>> should have returned a "Destination Unreachable".
>>
>> Part of the problem may have resulted from a little glitch in the DoD's
>> process of declaring the Internet protocols to be DoD Standards. When
>> they did that in the early 80s, they spec'd both the TCP and IP RFCs as
>> standards, but overlooked the ICMP spec. I remember we started seeing
>> machines come online with "DoD Standard implementations" as specified by
>> their companies contracts with whatever piece of DoD ordered the
>> equipment. They had implemented TCP and IP, but not ICMP. After much
>> complaining by us at BBN and probably others, ICMP eventually got added
>> in some way, but it may have been a while before that spec actually got
>> into products.
>>
>> I have only anecdotal evidence, but it seems things have regressed over
>> the decades and now routers don't always respond to ICMP. I think some
>> ISPs have turned it off because of all the "ping" traffic they
>> experienced. I guess they don't consider it part of the Standard either.
>>
>> I remember when we decided at some meeting to split out the ICMP
>> functionality from the basic IP definition, mostly just for
>> organizational simplification. It's amazing to me what kinds of
>> longstanding and far reaching consequences a little mistake (overlooking
>> ICMP as a critical component of TCP/IP) can have.
>>
>> /Jack
>>
>>
>> On 8/12/20 5:58 PM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>>> I have a ping story. I got sent to Germany in the mid-80s (1986?) to
>> help install an IP testbed for USAREUR. We used the Cisco AGS routers
>> (The ones with the fan that sounded like an airplane taking off ). Cisco
>> was a very small company so we got a lot of support in the bug fixing
>> department. I remember having to call them one night from Germany because
>> I didn't like what their ping implementation was doing. I noticed their
>> routers would respond to a ping even if the interface with the ping's IP
>> destination address was down. I didn't like that behavior so I think I
>> ended up having to get Kirk Lougheed? on the line to get them to agree to
>> change this for us. I've always wondered if the behavior of ping on a
>> gateway /router was specified. I certainly didn't have the time, or
>> resources at my finger tips, to check this out at the time.
>>> barbara
>>>
>>> On Wednesday, August 12, 2020, 4:54:15 PM PDT, Jacob Goense via
>> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>> The fuzzball archive seems down at the moment, but it is still
>>> there[1]. Mills' PING was a client and server, or "pinger and
>>> sounder" as he called it. Muus' ping(8) was the client side to
>>> complement the BSD kernel.
>>>
>>>
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20131020063249/http://malarky.udel.edu/~dmills/data/du0/PING.MAC
>>> On 2020-08-12 07:01, Louis Mamakos via Internet-history wrote:
>>>> The timing here lines up with Dave Mills' fuzzball code we had
>>>> running at University of Maryland (where Dave was a visiting
>>>> professor for a "special topics" networking class.) I do
>>>> fondly recall Fuzzball PING and it was certainly a well-used
>>>> tool for the initial debugging of the UNIVAC TCP/IP stack that
>>>> Mike Petry and I started implementing at that time - fall 1980.
>>>>
>>>> It was also around that time that we added the initial Ethernet
>>>> support in the Fuzzball code, adding ARP and a QBus InterLAN
>>>> interface. Once again, PING was the universal debugging tool.
>>>>
>>>> I do recall seeing "Packet InterNet Groper" in the Fuzzball
>>>> source code.
>>>>
>>>> louie
>>>>
>>>> On 11 Aug 2020, at 16:21, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Ping may have been released in 1983 but it was in use long before
>>>>> that. When I was in charge of keeping the "core gateways" running,
>>>>> Dave Mills was famous for doing lots of experiments that often gave us
>>>>> heartburn. I clearly recall him telling us at some Internet meeting
>>>>> about his experiments and the tool he used - he called it "Ping", and
>>>>> explained it was an acronym for "Packet InterNet Groper". This was
>>>>> probably 1979/80 or thereabouts. I don't know that Dave invented
>>>>> "ping", but I believe that's where I first heard about it.
>>>>>
>>>>> /Jack
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 8/11/20 1:06 PM, Alejandro Acosta via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>> uh, good question.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Based on the days of the firsts networks and the release of ping the
>>>>>> answer is none, afaik, ping was released in 1983
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 8/11/20 2:43 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>>> A related question, if you're exploring Internet History, might be
>>>>>>> "Which of the early networks were ever actually operational nets on
>>>>>>> The
>>>>>>> Internet, i.e., nets that you could ping and get a response?"
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I was involved in the 77-80s timeframe, and as I recall, many of
>>>>>>> those
>>>>>>> low numbered networks were assigned numbers, but didn't actually
>>>>>>> ever
>>>>>>> get connected to the operational Internet.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> /Jack Haverty
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 8/11/20 10:53 AM, Alejandro Acosta via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>>>> Hello All,
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> First, really thanks for your comments.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I read a little bit more about the network 13. I supposed I
>>>>>>>> should
>>>>>>>> have done this before sending the email.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> As I said, it does not appear in RFC 790 (Sep 81), and it does
>>>>>>>> not
>>>>>>>> appear until RFC 990 (Nov 1986 assigned to XEROX)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> However, I just realized that actually network 13 was first seen
>>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>>> RFC 739 assigned to National Physical Laboratory and last seen in
>>>>>>>> RFC
>>>>>>>> 776.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Thanks again & sorry for the noise.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Alejandro,
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 8/11/20 12:45 PM, Alex McKenzie via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Alejandro,
>>>>>>>>> I don't think any of us can speak for Jon Postel, who assigned the
>>>>>>>>> numbers, and sadly he is no longer with us to speak for himself.
>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>> knew Jon pretty well and he showed no evidence of being a
>>>>>>>>> superstitious person. I think Steve Crocker's explanation that
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> number was assigned to an entity that could not yet be made public
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> the date RFC 790 was released is the most likely answer.
>>>>>>>>> For what its worth,Alex McKenzie
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On Tuesday, August 11, 2020, 9:08:58 AM EDT, Alejandro
>>>>>>>>> Acosta
>>>>>>>>> via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hello list,
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> I have a question and one more time I believe this a good
>>>>>>>>> place
>>>>>>>>> to ask.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> During the weekend I read the old RFC 790 (ASSIGNED NUMBERS).
>>>>>>>>> When
>>>>>>>>> reading it I noticed the following:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> {...}
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> 009.rrr.rrr.rrr BRAGG-PR Ft. Bragg Packet Radio
>>>>>>>>> Net
>>>>>>>>> [JEM]
>>>>>>>>> 010.rrr.rrr.rrr ARPANET ARPANET [17,1,VGC]
>>>>>>>>> 011.rrr.rrr.rrr UCLNET University College London
>>>>>>>>> [PK]
>>>>>>>>> 012.rrr.rrr.rrr CYCLADES CYCLADES [VGC]
>>>>>>>>> 013.rrr.rrr.rrr Unassigned [JBP]
>>>>>>>>> 014.rrr.rrr.rrr TELENET TELENET [VGC]
>>>>>>>>> 015.rrr.rrr.rrr EPSS British Post Office EPSS
>>>>>>>>> [PK]
>>>>>>>>> 016.rrr.rrr.rrr DATAPAC DATAPAC [VGC]
>>>>>>>>> 017.rrr.rrr.rrr TRANSPAC TRANSPAC [VGC]
>>>>>>>>> 018.rrr.rrr.rrr LCSNET MIT LCS Network
>>>>>>>>> [43,10,DDC2]
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> {...}
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> As you can see the 013.rrr.rrr.rrr was unassigned but some
>>>>>>>>> subsequent
>>>>>>>>> prefix were (014, 015 ..... ). Is there any reason for it?. I know
>>>>>>>>> 013
>>>>>>>>> was later assigned to XEROX-NET.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> I wonder if 013 was skipped because some sort of
>>>>>>>>> superstitions?.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Alejandro,
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
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