RFC 523

RFC 523: SURVEY is in Operation Again 💖

Okay bestie, the title block first 🎀 This is RFC 523, "SURVEY is in Operation Again," from the Network Working Group. Abhay K. Bhushan wrote it from MIT-DMCG (NIC 17048), dated June 5, 1973. It doesn't say what it obsoletes or updates, and it doesn't list a category. 🦋

The Big Announcement 📣

So the survey program on the MIT-DMCG computer system is running again ✨ The whole point of this message is to let the network community know. We're surveying hosts every 20 minutes now, which is up from the old 15 minutes 🕐

Some sites had trouble with incomplete ICPs when the survey first came up 😭 That's been totally fixed, no cap 💅

If the survey is messing with your site, call 617-253-1428 or 253-1449 and tell Abhay 📞 If you'd like a particular server site not surveyed, just send a written request and it's done 🙈 And if you want your site surveyed but it isn't yet, you can ask orally or in writing and it'll get added 💜

Who Is Being Surveyed 👀

These are the sites currently being surveyed, with host numbers in decimal:

1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,10,11,13,14,15,16,23,31,32,35,65,66,69,70,74,78,86,133,
134,138,198.

We send an RFC to socket1 and then do the full ICP run. That means we set up telnet connections and then close them 🔌 Here's the twist: response time is now measured as the time it takes to establish those telnet connections. So if your response time suddenly looks bigger, don't panic 😅 The new numbers are more meaningful and honestly reflect what's really happening 🧠

NETSTATUS Is Giving Main Character Energy 🌟

We're also running a NETSTATUS service on socket 15 (decimal) 🧚 If you ICP to host 70 on socket 15, you'll get output shaped like this:

        mm,dd.yyyy,hh,mm
        nnn,c,ttt
        nnn,c,ttt
        .......
        -1

The first line is month, day, year, hour, and minute 📅 After that comes a list of host numbers, a code, and a response time in tenths of a second ⏱️ The list ends with a -1, and then we close the connections right after sending the data. It's built so that both humans and programs can read it, which is iconic 👑

Want the fancier version? Log into dmcg and use the NETWRK subsystem, which has commands for showing the survey data in lots of formats (Ref. RFC 308, NIC 9259) 🎀 We're also recording all this data on the DATACOMPUTER (CCA) 💾

Comments and suggestions are welcome and genuinely appreciated 🫶

Thank You 🌸

Abhay Bhushan AKB@DMCG (NIC ident AKB)

RFC 523               SURVEY is in Operation Again             June 1973

[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFC archives by Alex McKenzie with ] [ support from GTE, formerly BBN Corp. 10/99 ]