[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Greg Skinner]

> On Mar 28, 2022, at 11:19 AM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> Just to add to the comments,
> 
>> On Mar 28, 2022, at 12:48, Craig Partridge via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>> The UDP vs. TCP debate was pretty fierce and the experience of the time
>> came down firmly on the UDP side. Recall this was the era of daily
>> congestion collapse of the Internet between 1987 and 1990.
> 
> Somehow this argument (which I know was intense at the time) is the most absurd. All of the functions in TCP that are relevant are feedback functions that only involve the source and destination. In between, the handling of UDP and TCP packets by the routers is the same. If anything, TCP packets with congestion control have a better chance of being received and a TCP solution would have required fewer packets be generated in the first place. (The last thing a management system should be doing when things go bad is generating lots of traffic, but SNMP was good at that.)

No argument from me about management systems generating too much traffic.  However, regarding congestion control, around 1987, mitigation was underway, but solutions that were widely deployed in TCP/IP implementations were still a few years off.  That helped make UDP more attractive, at least in the short term.

[…]

>> There was a network management project in the late 1980s, name now eludes
>> me but led by Jil Wescott and DARPA funded, that sound similar in goals to
>> what Jack H. describes doing at Oracle.  I leaned on wisdom from those
>> folks (esp. the late Charlie Lynn) as Glenn Trewitt and I sought to figure
>> out what HEMS should look like.

Right.  From the tcp-ip mailing list and Usenet newsgroup, January 1987:

——

Date:      Tue, 20-Jan-87 12:12:04 EST
From:      leiner at ICARUS.RIACS.EDU
To:        mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject:   Re: Gateway Monitoring

Craig,

As you probably are aware, there has been quite a bit of work done
already in "monitoring".  In fact, Jil Westcott at BBN has been doing
some work in automated network monitoring related to ADDCOMPE and packet
radio networks.  There have also been several proposals for "monitoring
protocols".

I'm happy to see you working in this area.  It is clearly critical for
large internets like NSFnet and the evolving national research internet.
Hopefully, with this new push, a "standard approach" can be developed.

Barry

——

BTW, interested readers can see discussions on this and related topics at the ban.ai TCP/IP mailing list archive <https://ban.ai/multics/non-multics-docs/tcpip-digest/sd-archive/archive/>.  (You may get a message indicating SSL certificates have expired.)

—gregbo