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

[vinton cerf]

great story!!!

v


On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 2:24 PM Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
> > --
> > *****
> > Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
> > mailing lists.
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
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