[52141] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Inter-ISP/Telco/X.25 security procedures?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Partridge)
Mon Sep 16 15:36:48 2002
To: Mark Kent <mark@noc.mainstreet.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 16 Sep 2002 11:38:29 PDT."
<200209161838.g8GIcTMT079274@noc.mainstreet.net>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 15:36:13 -0400
From: Craig Partridge <craig@aland.bbn.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
In message <200209161838.g8GIcTMT079274@noc.mainstreet.net>, Mark Kent writes:
>OK, so there is my point. Back in those days the network security
>folks would often find themselves in the same lunch line as the "ISP"
>security folks. And they were available by phone with just a four
>digit extension.
Oh it's worse than that :-).
At least as late as 1987, we knew each other's phone numbers (and in some
cases, network maps) by heart.
My favorite personal stories of this ilk are:
* c. 1986 I went into Dennis Rockwell's office (he worked down the hall
from me on CSNET) trying to track down a TCP performance problem to
another site. He pulled out a network map, pinged the intermediate
routers (no traceroute in those days), sent a few specialized
test packets, then called up the guy who managed the router (at
another company) and told him his router was misbehaving and which
bug was causing the misbehavior.
* c. 1984 I was writing a UNIX kernel implementation of HMP (the network
monitoring protocol before SNMP). I'd just gotten the kernel to
start sending packets, so I sent a poll (GET) message to a local
router. I got no reply, so I sent the packet again.
10 seconds later my phone rang. It was Mike Brescia at the BBN NOC.
He said "Craig, are you trying to HMP poll 128.89.0.1?" Me "Yes".
Mike: "You've got the bytes swapped in the HMP password field."
Craig
