[ih] state of the internet probes? (was Re: AOL in perspective)

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2025, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:

> Several years later, circa 1980, we had a similar experience with the 
> ARPANET and the emerging Internet which was being built around it.  
> Lots of now inexpensive minicomputer gear had appeared on the 
> Internet, connected by LANs to the ARPANET.  I was the "Internet guy" 
> at BBN, and one day a NOC operator stuck his head in my office and 
> said something like "What's your Internet doing!!?"  It was probably a 
> bit more colorful than that.  The ARPANET was thrashing again, and the 
> NOC had traced the problem to traffic to/from gateways.   That made it 
> my problem.
>
> Debug, XNET, SNMP, ... IIRC, it turned out that Berkeley had just 
> released a new version of BSD, and announced it to the user 
> community.  There were a lot of BSD systems out there.   The new BSD 
> included a new feature, that probed all the gateways out on the 
> ARPANET and generated a status report of "State of the Internet". 
> Updated automatically of course.
>
> The server that performed all that probing was part of the new OS 
> release.  And... it was "enabled" by default.   So as the new release 
> propagated out into all those systems, they all started probing every 
> gateway continuously.   Like Marc's SURVEY program, this caused the 
> ARPANET to internally hemorrhage.   A quick call to ARPA, and a quick 
> order to Berkeley, and the cyberattack stopped. Took a while IIRC.

What is this automated probing of all gateways to generate a 
report?

(I tried looking at all known BSD releases but cannot find yet.)

I had also read a story about an overload and that Sun or Berkeley had 
a new release with a tool to continuously probe every gateway on the 
Arpanet to maintain a little display of the state.  (I cannot find who I 
got it from and I asked again this month who I thought I got it from but 
no memory of it.)

Does anyone know what this tool was? Was it Sun or BSD?

Any example of the status report or display?