[ih] Dan Lynch has passed away

[Dave Crocker]

On 4/1/2024 9:23 AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history wrote:
> We also did TCP interop tests - whoever broke the
> most TCPs got a bottle of champagne from yours truly.


An anecdote about interop testing outside of a planned event:

Roughly 1987.  At Ungerman-Bass we'd put TCP onto the the company's 
'intelligent' Ethernet card.  The card had a 80186 processor, whicht was 
more powerful than the chip on many PCs. Our Telnet and FTP ran on the PC.

We'd been deploying for some time, with no interoperability problems.  
Then one day I get a call from Boeing which was testing our product.  
(Boeing was big on OSI in those days.  This group was off in a corner of 
the company.)  They reported that our telnet was not working against 
another company's telnet server.

We had a primitive packet-capture tool and I had them use it to record 
the session.  On reviewing this I found that the other company's product 
was doing the telnet protocol only to accept the connection and it then 
just handed the session over to the regular terminal handler, with no 
protocol engine mediating.

Unfortunately, our telnet client was aggressive and initiated some 
options.  But the requests were just treated as user data ans were 
getting echoed back to our telnet client.

I called the customer up and went through the details with them. They 
had been working with us for awhile and were technically quite 
competent.  So I was thrown off-balance when their response to my 
showing them what was happening was to asked what /we/ were going to do 
to fix it.

I repeated the summary of the problem, noting that the other company's 
product was in completely violation of the telnet spec and Boeing should 
get them to change it.

Their response was that they understood this and would certainly talk 
with the other company.  But ours was the product causing the problem -- 
the other company's product worked fine with everyone else --  AND... we 
were more responsive...

I'd never thought of interoperability testing as a having marketing 
potential until that point.

Dan, on the other hand, saw this from the start.


d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social