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Network Working Group                                       Bob Bressler  (BBN)Request for Comments:  425                                             Dec 1972NIC #13010                   "But my NCP costs $500 a day..."Now that networking is becoming commonplace, people are beginning to measurethe cost of their network software and network use.  A not insignificantportion of this use turns out to be random prodding and poking of one systemby another.  An example of this is the "Survey" mechanism that many sites areconstructing to see "who's up."  Several systems have noted that this onemechanism alone accounts for a log of their overhead, and is not chargeable toany given user.In response to this particular problem, MIT-DMCG and UCLA-NMC, who have bothbeen doing surveys for some time, have agreed upon a standard format for hostsurvey data and will make it available to the network community.  They will bejoined by a third site, and will provide a standard socket to obtain thisinformation.  The data will be a concise character stream so as to be bothhuman and machine readable.The exact format of the data and the socket number will be forthcoming.The intent of all this is for all other sites to stop surveying on their ownand get this data from one of the participating "Official Surveyors" eitherprompted by a user's request or on a periodic basis, whatever they wish.This should, itself, help considerably to eliminate a lot of the network'noise factor.'  But, in addition, we should all try to be more aware of thecost of this type of traffic and try to avoid repeated interactions with agiven Host without some expressed consent - be it an account number of somespecific experiment.BB/ph