[ih] A paper

[vinton cerf]

thanks jack, as usual, a helpful contribution.
The paper has a POV and stretches to make it stick.

v


On Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 9:15 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Like Bob, I struggled through much of the paper, so I have no comments
> except on the discussion of the case study of EGP where I have personal
> historical experience.  On page 390, it states:
>
> "DARPA directed its contractor Bolt Beranek and Newman to begin cre-
> ating the framework for autonomous systems in the late 1970s"
>
> I was the "Program Manager" at BBN on the receiving end of that DARPA
> direction, So I think I can provide some personal experience to the case
> study.   It was actually the early 80s.  I was there.
>
> For the curious, I wrote up an informal summary of that event in
> Internet History which is still available here:
>
>
> http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2010-February/001219.html
>
> The EGP discussion is somewhat near the end.
>
> ------
>
> At the time EGP was defined, there were lots of unsolved problems and
> lots of people with ideas about how to solve them.  It seemed that
> everyone wanted to build a Gateway (aka today as "router") so they could
> try out their own ideas.   At the same time, there was a growing
> community of users demanding a reliable stable communications
> infrastructure, especially the groups in Europe who were dependent on
> the fledgling Internet for their work with colleagues in the US.   No
> one knew how to run a stable service while at the same time
> experimenting with all sorts of new ideas. The Internet was still a
> Research activity, but also expected to work all the time.
>
> Bob's direction was to try to find a way which would enable people other
> than the "Gateway Group" at BBN to build their own Gateways, able to
> interoperate with the rest of the Internet, but keep the "core" Internet
> gateways reliable and available 24x7.   It had to be possible for people
> other than BBN to build a gateway.  That's what Bob asked me to do.
>
> So, back at BBN, I recruited Dr. Eric Rosen and we spent a day or two
> talking about it, and came up with the notion of "Autonomous Systems",
> which were collections of Gateways (not networks as the paper says)
> managed by a single operator.  Eric wrote up EGP as the simplest
> possible protocol to permit Autonomous Systems to interconnect so that
> others could try out their ideas in their own research sandboxes, and
> interoperate with other ASes.
>
> Since at BBN we were responsible for making the "core" gateways operate
> reliably, the focus, and primary purpose, of EGP for us was to make it
> *possible* for any one AS to insulate itself from disruptive activity of
> some other AS, while we at BBN focussed on making the core system of the
> Internet as reliable as the ARPANET had become.   We needed EGP in order
> to keep our core gateways reliable.
>
> The paper says - "Autonomous systems insulated routing errors within
> each autonomous system".   That's not true, and wasn't a goal.  EGP did
> not guarantee such insulation, but simply made it *possible* for any AS
> to internally implement whatever firewalls and sanity checks its
> designers thought necessary as "insulation".  The RFC defining EGP
> states this on the cover:
>
> "It is proposed to establish a standard for Gateway to Gateway
> procedures that allow the Gateways to be mutually suspicious."
>
> Note "allow".  EGP didn't guarantee it or have any mechanisms itself to
> implement "suspicion".
>
> Subsequently Eric wrote several documents (these may have been RFCs or
> IENs) which detailed design ideas considered for use within the
> BBN-operated AS of the "core" gateways.   I don't recall ever seeing any
> descriptions of what other gateway builders did to insulate their own
> ASes from outside disruption.   But I may have just missed them as I
> went on to other projects.
>
> The paper also says:
>
> "As such, it was a part of handing organizations far more freedom and
> autonomy to organize their own networks. Yet in helping ensure the
> victory of TCP/IP (TCP/IP), it also reduced freedom by helping impose a
> network architecture that resulted in a fairly homogenous system of IP
> and Ethernet, rather than the heterogenous mix of local networks and
> addressing systems originally envisioned.52"
>
> Huh?   What did TCP/IP defeat?   ASes could contain any kind of network,
> not limited to Ethernets. E.g., SATNET, the WideBandNet, ARPANET, X.25,
> LANs, and others were part of the Internet.  Yes, everything was based
> on IP, but each network had its own addressing and transport protocols
> (even carrier pigeons!).
>
> Again, the Internet was a *Research Project* at the time, and EGP was
> intended as a mechanism to allow different, and sometimes competing,
> research ideas to proceed in parallel, with the particular ideas that
> were observed to work best being folded into the definition of the next
> generation of the TCP/IP/ICMP/etc protocols.    Rough consensus and
> running code....
>
> At the time, there were many unsolved issues and concerns about the
> mechanisms of the Internet.   Some issues had "placeholder" mechanisms
> defined into the protocols, where there was still much concern that a
> particular mechanism would work as the Internet grew and was used in
> many ways.  Examples include the "Source Quench", "URGent Pointer",
> Fragmentation/Reassembly, Type-Of-Service, and Time-To-Live.   There was
> rough consensus that all of these mechanisms had serious omissions or
> flaws, and must be replaced when someone figured out a better approach.
> The creation of ASes and EGP was intended to make faster progress on
> such issues, by enabling multiple players to perform their own
> independent experimentation.
>
> As far as I remember, there was never any discussion or consideration of
> "human rights", other than some concern about the US-centric nature of
> the research.  We were just trying to get the %^$^%$# thing to work.
> The general feeling was that the Internet was a research project, which
> would be replaced by OSI networks, as soon as those committees got such
> systems defined, deployed and working.
>
> As Bob said, TCP/IP "won" largely because it worked well enough for it
> to be useful.   Also various companies, mostly startups, built things
> that people could buy, and educational institutions delivered a constant
> stream of entry-level engineers who knew how to use it when they went
> out and got jobs.
>
> All of the above refers to the earliest period of the Internet, up until
> 1983 or so.  After that, as commercial and other interests came into the
> picture, things no doubt changed.
>
> /Jack Haverty
> MIT 1970-1977
> BBN 1977-1990
> Oracle 1990-1998
>
>
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