[ih] inter IMP hackery [was Recently restored and a small ARPANET was run using simulated IMP hardware, ]

[Craig Partridge]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 12:55 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
> i.e. was there a "precursor" to some kind of SNMP capability that allowed
> UCLA-NMC to peer inside IMPs or hosts?
>

There was certainly something as Bernie Cosell published RFC 218 to say
that the format of reporting status reporting was changing from text to
binary.

RFC 381 (Walden and McQuillan) lists information the host could extract
from its local IMP about the state of the network.

Much much later there were tools such as the Host Monitoring Protocol
(HMP), which despite its name, was used to monitor BBN routers.  See
IEN-197 and RFC-869 and view the contents of the messages as rough
guidance.  I wrote an implementation of HMP in late 1984 or early 1985 and
discovered the data I got back did not conform to RFC-869 in any way, shape
or form.

Fond memory. The first HMP packet I sent was to 128.89.01 from the Sun
workstation on my desk. 128.89.01 was the BBN router between our interior
Ethernet (vs. net 8, which was our internal ARPANET) and ARPANET.  I got no
reply, so I read through my code, thought it was right, and tried again.
My phone rang -- it was Mike Brescia asking if I was trying to send an HMP
packet to his router.  I said yes, and his reply was, "you've got the bytes
swapped in the password field."  Better than ICMP!

Craig
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