Whats this?

[creative craig]

Sorry for the probaly easy question, but my raw logs for one of my is going through abit of an update at the moment, so I cant check this out for myself :(

I found this in my logs:

Old style Arpanet (arpa)

It said it was in the list of countries that the surfers servers originated from. Anyone had this before or know where it could be from?

Craig

[digitalghost]

Arpanet was the government's answer to providng communication should a disaster occur. The government wanted a way to ensure that data could be shared by computers and if the telecommunication structure was destroyed they wanted voice communication to continue. Prior to arpanet voice communication had limitations. If the full carrier wave was broken at any point, the communication was lost. Licklider and his group solved this by creating digital packets, the header of each packet carried the end destination. Routers were set up to pass this digital data along to the end destination. As long as the IP address was connected to the final destination voice communication packets would arrive. Later they modified this so that computers could use the protocol. (TCP/IP).

ARPA was the computer network before the internet as we know it came along. Many of the schools and government facilities on this network are identified as ARPA. They simply merged into the current structure.

For a great story about ARPA and the internet, read Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Great book full of details about the creation of ARPA and those "ruggedized Honeywells".

[creative craig]

I know all about ARPA and the history of it :)

I am just wondering why it gives this as a country name:

Old style Arpanet (arpa)

Craig

[digitalghost]

Because ISO 3166 specifies that those computers along that network indentify themselves that way? The same reason that mil shows up in the logs? Or nato?

[dcheney]

IP numbers from the ARPA system resolve to names in the form:

[something].in-addr.arpa

Hence, they are listed as from the pseudo-country "arpa" (just like "edu", "org", etc.)

[creative craig]

Thanks for the info guys :)