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

[Barbara Denny]

 I think you are referring to the ANM (Automated Network Management) project in case people might want to look for more info.
barbara
    On Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 02:48:22 PM PDT, Craig Partridge via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 I wrote too swiftly.  I suspect Jack may be remembering a DARPA project
that Jil Wescott led that sought to build a distributed network management
service (the idea being the service talked to all devices on the network,
and then any monitoring app could simply connect to the service and learn
what was going on -- this meant managed devices weren't getting bombarded
with pings and such and could do their job).  Her team included Charlie
Lynn and Ross Callon and Karen Seo, and in odd moments, me.

I took some of the lessons from that project to HEMS.  I will say I got the
lesson half-right/half-wrong.  The right part, and this one of Jil's big
takeaways, was if the network is a mess, you are only going to get some
management packets through, so make sure each has as much information/does
as much as possible.  The wrong part was my take was a sick network meant
use TCP, because TCP will fight to get your data -- whereas others argued
it was UDP, because UDP, while unreliable, often did a great job of getting
*a* packet through.

SNMP chose UDP (rightly) and put the minimum info in each packet (which I
continue to think was a mistake :-)).

Craig

On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 3:39 PM Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net> wrote:

> 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?