[ih] Failures of the early Internet

[Noel Chiappa]

    > On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 9:20 PM Jack Haverty wrote:

    > Anybody else have recollections of early failures...?

This may not be the _kind_ of failure you're thinking of, but I remember
one...

We had just brought up the first ARPANET-connected gateway at MIT, and we
needed to let the BBN 'core' gateways (I forget what the jargon name for them
was at that point) know where MIT (net 18.) was connected, now.

So, I got a copy of the GGP spec (IEN-30, or IEN-109), but I was too
busy/lazy to do a full implementation of GGP - I just typed in (in octal!) a
'routing update' packet that showed MIT-GW as connected to net 18, along with
a few lines of code to send a copy, once a minute, to a list of gateways on
the ARPANET (here:

  GWTAB:.BYTE   12,3,0,50               ; BBN
        .BYTE   12,2,0,31               ; CSS-GATEWAY
        .BYTE   12,1,0,24               ; DCEC
        .BYTE   12,3,0,110              ; RCC-GATEWAY

is a copy of a later version of the table). I loaded this in to the MIT-GW,
started it up - but it didn't seem to be working.

Shortly thereafter, IIRC, I got a call from someone at BBN, saying something
like 'are you sending us GGP packets?' Apparently all their gateways had
crashed - after they got my routing update.

It turns out they had changed the format of routing updates - but nobody had
gotten around to updating the GGP documentation. So I had been sending them
old-format routing updates - which gave the BBN gateways indigestion.

I remember that at the next Internet meeting, I wound up telling Vint this
story (probably because somebody had been giving me grief about 'crashing all
the BBN gateways'), and he got this look on his face, and pulled out his
little 'things to do' notebook and wrote something in it.

We were later speculating that he'd written down 'fire Div 6' (or Div 4 -
whichever one it was that Ginny worked for), because shortly thereafter, it
was announced that Div 6 (or Div 4, whichever one it used to be) would be
replaced by the other one in running the BBN gateways. I have no idea if
there's any truth to that, but the change was made shortly afterwards!

	Noel

PS: A later version of the offending code still exists; here:

  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/gw/conf/sbr/route-1.mac

if anyone is interested. Note that the update format there is _not_ the one
in IEN-109! :-)