[ih] Correct name for early TCP/IP working group?

[Jack Haverty]

Right!   I do remember HMP.  I should have said that the early work led 
to the later definition of SNMP.

There was also lots of discussion of "NMP" - "the" Network Management 
Protocol".   But it was considered too elaborate, so the "Simple" NMP 
was defined as a first step.  I never knew whether it was "simple 
management" or "simple protocol", or intended for managing only "simple 
networks".

Also in 1980+-, I started a project to implement CMCC - the Catenet 
Monitoring and Control Center - which I recall David Floodpage built.  
IIRC, that was what the NOC at BBN used at first to manage the "core 
gateways".   See IEN 105.   That was part of the plan to "make the 
Internet a 24x7 reliable service".

The early 1980s were a time when the Internet mantra of "rough consensus 
and running code" was part of the culture.  Historians who rely only on 
the surviving written records contained in RFCs may get a somewhat 
warped view of how technology actually evolved.

In that era, RFCs documented technology that had usually been well 
vetted in actual use.  An example is the several RFCs that Jon Postel 
wrote, documenting TCP and IP so that they could be declared DoD 
Standards.  Jon interviewed all of us implementors to gather the details 
of how the current "running code" actually worked, and captured it in 
the RFCs.   RFCs were usually not proposals; they were documentation of 
what was actually operating.

Email was a fairly new facility then, so much of the technical 
discussion and argument was carried out in email, much (most?) of which 
has been lost.  We all liked to use our new toy - the 'net. Prior to 
email, such history would have likely been captured in papers, letters, 
conference proceedings, and such traditional means of publication and 
collaboration.

As we "operated" the core Internet, we learned what worked, what didn't 
work, what was useful, and how to translate the proven ARPANET operating 
techniques into the world of the Internet.

One operations "incident" I still recall occurred in those early days.

Mike Brescia was one of the "Gateway Group".  The ARPANET had a 
mechanism called "traps", which involved IMPs sending reports of 
anomalous events to the NOC.   This had been helpful in noticing things 
like circuits getting high error rates, which foretold failures before 
the routing mechanisms would react.

A similar capability was implemented in the "core gateways", and Mike 
watched the reports.

One day, Mike noticed that some gateways out in the Internet were 
reporting unusual numbers of IP checksum errors.  Investigation revealed 
that the errors all involved traffic from one host computer, located 
somewhere in the Midwest US (Wisconsin perhaps?). So it wasn't likely to 
be a gateway problem.

Mike used the NIC to look up information about that computer, discovered 
what it was (a PDP-11 IIRC), and looked at the failed datagrams' headers 
that the core gateway had included in the error reports.  It was a 
common problem, where the bytes in the 32-bit fields were out of order, 
leading to checksum failures.  (I had such a problem in the TCP I wrote 
for PDP-11 Unix too).

Mike found the "technical contact" for the site, and sent an email, 
advising that the TCP they were trying to get working had a bug, and 
needed to be changed to swap the bytes involved.

Shortly afterwards, he got a reply, something like "Hey, thanks! That 
fixed it."

Somewhat later, he got another reply, something like "Hey!  You're in 
Cambridge, hundreds of miles from me!  How did you do that????!"

It wasn't 1984 yet, but Big Brother was already inside The Internet.

Fun times,
Jack


On 1/29/25 01:19, Craig Partridge wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 12:41 AM Jack Haverty via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>     For example, NBS (now NIST) created a program for testing new TCP
>     implementations to make sure they followed the spec.   At BBN, in
>     preparation for the later DDN activity, we set up a service which
>     would
>     run the NBS tests for clients (using a dialup link), and then help
>     them
>     as consultants to fix whatever wasn't working.   There was lots of
>     work
>     to convert older programs like Telnet, FTP, and mail to use TCP
>     instead
>     of NCP, and to get ancillary, but important, technologies such as
>     SNMP
>     and ICMP widely implemented.
>
>
> Small nit.  SNMP didn't exist until 1988.  The Internet did not have a 
> standard management protocol until then.
>
> What you're probably thinking of is HMP (the Host Monitoring 
> Protocol), which despite its name, was actually used to monitor the 
> health of routers.  It was developed c. 1981 (IEN 197) and was 
> supported on the BBN routers and mailbridges in the 1980s.
>
> Craig
>
>
> -- 
> *****
> Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities 
> and mailing lists.

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