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

[Jack Haverty]

FYI, I don't recall ever seeing any "status report" myself, probably 
because I didn't use any of the computers involved.  I don't know much 
of the history of BSD.    My recollection is that the incident involved 
the DEC Vax machines which were becoming more prolific at the time.   It 
was sometime around 1980 +- a few years, definitely before July 1983 
when I switched jobs.

I remember that the way the incident was stopped involved someone at 
ARPA (Vint Cerf?  Barry Leiner?  Bob Kahn?).   They had leverage over 
the OS since it was a project funded by ARPA.   The source of the 
changes in traffic may not have been the OS itself, but perhaps some 
user-level program that was either distributed with, or updated, a new 
OS release.    It's possible that Sun was involved too, if only because 
ARPA projects were significant customers.   But I thought Sun emerged a 
bit later in the 1980s.

/Jack

On 9/17/25 08:46, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> 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?

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