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

[Bill Nowicki]

Do not think it can be blamed on Sun, since I was the token Sun Internet guy in the 1980s. Sun marketing decided in their infinite wisdom that the real demand would be for the ISO OSI stack, so focused its efforts there, alas. (Although you can blame Sun and BSD for the "Morris Worm", another story?) The only dabbling Sun did on the Arpanet I remember was a quick product I glued together we called SunLink DDN, which used our X.25 support and a simple connection manager I wrote to be our gateway between the Sun corporate network and the IMP at SRI. Not sure any other customer bought one?
As a fallout to the Morris Worm I did write a program which would do an SMTP (e-mail) probe to every IP address in a range, which at the time gave a good indication of which OS it was running if it was up or not.
The real melt-downs I dealt with were due to multicast routing into loops, but that was later in the 1990s and mostly over LANs.
Bill   On Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 01:46:38 PM PDT, Barbara Denny via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
  Jack,
I think you may have meant to type SMTP or something else,  not SNMP.
SNMP was more in the time frame of my looking at network management startups.
barbara
    On Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 01:29:11 PM PDT, Barbara Denny via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
  Sun was definitely selling workstations when I got to SRI in the fall of 1983.  I remembered being surprised that I had a model 100 in my office when I arrived.
Then in the mid to late? 1980s  Network management startup offerings would just use ping to figure out their customer's network (well maybe not all of them).  I briefly looked at them to decide what we might install for a military testbed in South Korea. 
barbara
    On Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 12:58:28 PM PDT, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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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