Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!MCC.COM!AI.CLIVE
From: AI.CLIVE@MCC.COM (Clive Dawson)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Network Connectivity - Part 2
Message-ID: <12443864209.25.AI.CLIVE@MCC.COM>
Date: 4 Nov 88 13:47:40 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22

After sending my previous message in which I wondered what would
cause only some hosts on net 10 to be able to communicate with
a certain other hosts, I began doing some systematic testing
to try and determine what the connectivity was really like.

In the process, I discovered the answer to my own question.  It
turns out that all the prime gateways which my TOPS-20 system
knew about were down!  Some years ago, the NIC assigned certain
MILNET gateways to each Arpanet host.  Up until yesterday,
these gateways have always been sufficient to provide all the
redirect info required.  But since all the Milnet gateways apparently
went down because of this virus, my system had nobody left to
ask.

I've added a couple of other non-Milnet prime gateways to
my INTERNET.GATEWAYS file, and all is well.  I suspect there
may be other TOPS-20 systems out there with the same problem,
since the practice of having only one or two entries in
the gateways file was pretty widespread for a while.

Clive
-------