[ih] Exterior Gateway Protocol

[Grant Taylor]

On 9/2/20 11:01 AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote:
> Liza Martin did one for the MIT so-called "C Gateway". That was 
> distributed to a number of people, along with the rest of the CGW 
> code. All that code is all still around (on the dump of the MIT-CSR 
> machine which was recently retrieved), and easily available.

Intriguing.

I found that gated implemented EGP, along with many other protocols, and 
some source archives from the late '90s.  I may take a swing at building 
them in a VM running Linux from the early 2000s.  -  I know that 
contemporary GCC was ... unhappy with the code.  Which is not surprising 
to me.

> I later re-wrote that one somewhat, to improve it, for the Proteon 
> router products. The one big change I recall which I made was to the 
> code which generated the lists of routes in the updates. To pack as 
> many entriess as possible into a single packet (IIRC, EGP routing table 
> updates were only single packets; no provision for overflow into sets 
> of 2 or more), it used a somewhat arcane organization, which a naive 
> implementation would be slow to generate. So I wrote code to walk the 
> routing' table, and generate an intermediate tree structure which was 
> a good match to the layout in the EGP updates; the code to generate 
> the output packets could then walk that swiftly. (Or, at least, 
> that's my best memory; it's been ~40 years since I last looked at it.)

Impressive work.

> I think I have all that code on a magtape somewhere, so it's 
> retrievable, but qith some effort. If you just want to see it, I can 
> scan the listings I have of it.
> 
> The other implementatinos I know of were for the BBN PDP-11 router 
> (in Macro-11, I would assume), and I assume there was one for the 
> Fuzzball (ditto).
> 
> If anyone's super-interested in EGP, Liza had a mailbox of mail with 
> other people outside MIT about work on EGP (Dave Mills led an effort 
> to modify EGPa from the original 'EGP1' to, among other things, hold 
> more routes, which is where that 'packed' format came from). That 
> is in that dump; if anyone is interested in it, I can go through it 
> and make sure there's no personal content, and make it available 
> (afer checking with Liza, if I can work out how to contact her, 
> do make sure it'e OK to let it out).

I'm retizent to ask someone to do work that I can't do myself.  But that 
being said, I wonder if it might be worth while to get some of the 
contents of some of these caches archived away somewhere for others to 
find them.  Internet Archive, TUHS, BitSavers, and the likes come to mind.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die