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

[Craig Partridge]

There's the great Floyd/Jacobson paper on this topic:
https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/sync_94.pdf

On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 2:34 PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> When Steve Casner and I were developing entertainment grade network
> video code Steve brought out what he called "eggbeater" diagrams that he
> had developed with Van Jacobson.  These diagrams tended to show that the
> network had a definite pulsing, much of which came from the fixed
> timeouts on protocols such as RIP and ARP.
>
> (This led us to randomize all of the timers in our code by +/- 50%.)
>
>          --karl--
>
> On 9/17/25 12:58 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> > 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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