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

[Craig Partridge]

SNMP was a simplified network management protocol influenced primary by
HEMS (which got to the RFC stage and a prototype but never launched) and a
little bit by the nascent CMIP.

Craig (who co-created HEMS with Glen Trewitt)

On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 3:32 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Right, SNMP came later, as a "Simplified" version of NMP - Network
> Management Protocol, which may have only existed in email discussions.
>
> IIRC, the earliest work on Internet management was done by David
> Floodpage as part of the "make Internet 24x7" work, and documented in
> some IENs, e.g., https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien132.txt
>
> All that led eventually to SNMP, which is what is most likely to be
> recognized today.
>
> Jack
>
> On 9/17/25 13:46, Barbara Denny via Internet-history 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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