RFC 967

All Victims Together 🎀

Okay bestie, this is RFC 967, and it's called "All Victims Together" 💖. It was written by M. A. Padlipsky of the Mitre Corporation and dated December 1985 🌸. The header doesn't list a category, and it doesn't say it obsoletes or updates anything, so there's nothing else to flag up here ✨.

Status of This Memo ✨

This RFC notes a significant omission from the networking literature and proposes to fix it 🫶. Distribution of this memo is unlimited 💅.

Discussion 💬

Okay so an interesting thing happened the other day 👀. Some people were visiting from IBM Federal Systems Division, and one of them pointed out that they had just as much trouble, if not more, with the operating system purveyors about making OS "changes" for networking as anyone else 😭. At the time I just went "ok so we're all victims together" and moved on, but I kept thinking about it, so here are some thoughts for the RFC community 🧚:

• To us, it's axiomatic that networking code is system code when it has to be ✨
• To Them, it's anathema 💀
• We haven't really hit very hard on the point in the literature. I've made a few strong assertions along those lines here and there, and it's at least implicit in some of Dave Clark's stuff, unless in my usual slipshod fashion I've just missed seeing it 🙈
• It would probably be responsible of us to rectify the omission (assuming there is one), since the literature is supposed to be the way the researchers educate the practitioners 🎓
• Therefore, I propose a new subseries of RFCs on how the networking code was integrated with various OSs, with an eye toward later publishing the collection in the open literature (RFCs being only semi-open, after all) 🦋. I'll even volunteer to coordinate, at least by taking offers from people who are willing to tackle various systems and telling them who else is having a bash at the same one, for possible collaboration. I might even merge the results if people send in things they've already done. (I suppose I even have to offer to do a bit of editing, if people want 💅.)

What I'd like to see is a bunch of little essays along the lines of what I tried on Multics in RFC 928, pp.14-21 📚. That would probably be a waste of electrons to reproduce here, but I will if Jon thinks it's worthwhile at some level 🌈. With luck, volunteers will emerge to discuss all of the major operating systems currently on the net, and most of the minor ones too, since one of the most interesting philosophical bits of this is seeing just what cuts and pastes get made to any OS once it's networked 🔥. My guess is that, given modern systems' tendency to make adding device drivers more straightforward and to offer interprocess communication primitives at the system level, the likeliest difficulty would be getting onto the process creation path properly for Telnet. But that's reasoning ahead of the data 🤓. Suffice it to say that each piece should address Host-Host protocol interpreter(s) integration as well as Host-Comm Subnet Processor PI (including device driver, if one), plus something about Telnet and something else about FTP (at least to the extent of whether it's per-user or "monolithic", on the server side that is), and of course some relevant anatomizing of the OS itself 🎀.

The moral, it seems to me, is that we have a chance to strike back at the oppressors by showing them what they should be furnishing with their silly off-the-rack systems, if they're going to keep objecting to our alterations that make the bloody things fit anywhere near right 😤. It's a little extra effort on our part, but it's probably a worthy goal 💜. Indeed, if anybody from IPTO is watching, I'd even go so far as to suggest a pro tem System Integration Task force, if I hadn't already volunteered once in this thing and used up my quota 🙃.

Think about it 💖.

Editor's Note 📝

The editor recalls a session at the 5th Data Communication Symposium (the one at Snowbird) titled "Impact of Networks on Host-System Design and Architecture" (1977) ✨.