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

[Craig Partridge]

I have a similar Brescia story related to HMP.

I wrote the HMP implementation for BSD Unix.  It was not the server (BSD
didn't respond to HMP) but rather a client that could query the gateways.
This was for Jil Wescott's ambitious distributed network management system
in the mid-1980s (which did a lot of interesting stuff, Ross Callon and
Charlie Lynn were the tech leads, and influenced HEMS and thus SNMP).

Once I thought I had everything debugged, I got the HMP password (a 16-bit
number!  good for all routers! we were so naive!) for the routers, plugged
it into my code, and launched an HMP query request from my desktop machine
(SUN workstation serial number 201 if I remember correctly) at the main BBN
router (128.89.0.1 -- don't recall its net 10 address).  No answer came
back.  So I tried again.  As I'm watching for a return packet my phone
rings -- it's Mike Brescia "Craig are you sending HMP requests to the BBN
router?" "Yes MIke, that's me" "You forgot to swap the bytes in the
password field."

Craig

On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 11:29 AM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

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

-- 
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