[ih] Failures of the early Internet

[Scott Brim]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 9:20 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Another incident I recall was also a routing issue.  I don't remember
> exactly where it happened, but two sites, universities IIRC, were
> collaborating on some research project and had a need to send data back
> and forth.  Their pathway to each other through the Internet was
> somewhat long and often congested.   So they decided to fix the problem
> by installing a circuit directly between their two campus' routers.
>
> Money was of course an issue, but they found the funds to pay for a 9.6
> kb/s line.  They were surprised to observe that the added line only made
> things worse.  File transfers took even longer than before.  Of course
> their change to the topology of the Internet had unexpectedly made their
> 9.6 line the best route for all sorts of Internet traffic unrelated to
> their project.
>

That might have been us, and if so it's another tie-in for Dave Mills. In
early January 1987 we lit up the first link in what was to be NYNET (New
York), between Cornell Theory Center and Columbia IT. We figured Cornell
would be a gateway for all of NYNET to the budding NSFNet. However, at that
time both Cornell and Columbia CS were connected to ARPAnet, and Columbia
CS was announcing a static route to HP (net 16) to its campus, for some
project in a department. At Cornell we believed everything we received, so
we forwarded Columbia's route to the rest of our campus, thus to our CS
Arpanet connection, and onward. There was no route filtering anywhere. We
discovered the HP routing loop pretty quickly and shut down dynamic
routing. Acouple weeks later we were meeting with Dave, probably at UDel,
and he said "we have to have bidirectional route filtering", and thus the
gated project was born.

Scott