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

[vinton cerf]

the Berkeley BSD project was managed by Duane Adams and perhaps initiated
by Bob Kahn.

v


On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 9:58 PM 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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