RFC 425

RFC 425: "But my NCP costs $500 a day..." 🎀

Okay bestie, this one is from December 1972 (Dec 1972 🍓) and it's by Bob Bressler of BBN, in the Network Working Group, with the NIC number #13010 ✨. The original doesn't list a category or status, and it doesn't say what it obsoletes or updates, so I'm not guessing 🙈. The title is the vibe though: "But my NCP costs $500 a day..." 💸💀

Now that networking is becoming commonplace, people are starting to actually measure what their network software and network use cost 💅 And a not-so-small chunk of that use is just random prodding and poking, one system poking another. The big example is the "Survey" mechanism that tons of sites built to check "who's up" 👀 Several systems noticed that this one mechanism alone was eating a lot of their overhead, and nobody could charge it to any particular user. Lowkey wild 😭

So MIT-DMCG and UCLA-NMC, who've both been running surveys for a while, agreed on a standard format for host survey data and are sharing it with the whole network community 🫶 A third site is joining them, and together they'll provide a standard socket to grab this info. The data is a concise character stream, so it's readable by both humans and machines. Iconic ✨

The exact format of the data and the socket number are forthcoming 🧚

The big goal is for every other site to stop running its own surveys and instead get the data from one of the participating "Official Surveyors" 👑 Whether it's prompted by a user's request or on a periodic basis is totally up to them, no judgment 🌈

This should, itself, help a lot with the 'noise factor' on the network 🔥 But also, let's all be more aware of what this kind of traffic costs and avoid repeatedly poking a given Host without some expressed consent, like an account number or a specific experiment. Main character energy is respecting other people's systems 🦋💜

BB/ph 💖