~ January 1993 INTERNET MONTHLY REPORTS ------------------------ The purpose of these reports is to communicate to the Internet Research Group the accomplishments, milestones reached, or problems discovered by the participating organizations. This report is for Internet information purposes only, and is not to be quoted in other publications without permission from the submitter. Each organization is expected to submit a 1/2 page report on the first business day of the month describing the previous month's activities. These reports should be submitted via network mail to: Ann Westine Cooper (Cooper@ISI.EDU) NSF Regional reports - Corinne Carroll (ccarroll@NNSC.NSF.NET) Directory Services reports - Murali Venkateshaiah (murali@ISI.EDU) Requests to be added or deleted from the Internet Monthly report list should be sent to "imr-request@isi.edu". Details on obtaining the current IMR, or back issues, via FTP or EMAIL may be obtained by sending an EMAIL message to "rfc- info@ISI.EDU" with the message body "help: ways_to_get_imrs". For example: To: rfc-info@ISI.EDU Subject: getting imrs help: ways_to_get_imrs TABLE OF CONTENTS INTERNET ACTIVITIES BOARD INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3 Internet Projects BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8 CIX (COMMERCIAL INTERNET EXCHANGE). . . . . . . . . . . . page 12 ISI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 13 JVNCNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24 NEARNET (NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK) . . . page 26 NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . page 27 NSFNET/ANSNET BACKBONE ENGINEERING. . . . . . . . . . . . page 28 NSFNET/INFORMATION SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 34 UCL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 36 CALENDAR OF EVENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 39 INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS ---------------------------- 1. Let me remind everyone that the next IETF meeting will be held in Columbus, Ohio from March 29 through April 2, 1993 (yes, this does mean that the IESG Open Plenary will be held on April First), and is being co-hosted by OARNet and The Ohio State University. The Newcomers' Orientation and the Registration Reception will be held on Sunday, March 28. Registration information has already been sent and updates will be made to the IETF Announcement list. Note that the 27th meeting of the IETF, scheduled for July of 1993, will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and will be co-hosted by SURFnet and RARE. This will be the first time an IETF meeting has been held outside of North America. The Secretariat will be distributing information and instructions for making hotel reservations relatively soon to facilitate making travel plans and arrangements, but will NOT be accepting meeting registrations for Amsterdam at this time. 2. As a reminder, minutes from IESG meetings and teleconferences can be found in the shadow directories under the iesg directory. The following file naming convention is used: iesg.YY-MM-DD (e.g. iesg.92-12-21 for the minutes from December 21, 1992). 3. One new working group was established during the month of January, 1993: Simple Internet Protocol (sip) Additionally, four working groups were concluded: IP over FDDI (fddi) Multi-Media Bridging (mmb) Internet User Glossary (userglos) RIP Version II (ripv2) 4. The IESG approved the following 13 actions during the month of January, 1993: o A String Representation of Distinguished Names as a Proposed Standard. o Using the OSI Directory to Achieve User Friendly Naming as an Experimental Protocol. o Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I: Message Encryption and Authentication Procedures as a Proposed Standard. o Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part II: Certificate-Based Key Management as a Proposed Standard. o Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part III: Algorithms, Modes, and Identifiers as a Proposed Standard. o Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part IV: Key Certification and Related Services as a Proposed Standard. o Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS1 Interface Type moving to Historic Status. o Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3 Interface Type moving to Historic Status. o Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS1 and E1 Interface Types as a Proposed Standard. o Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3/E3 Interface Type as a Proposed Standard. o FYI on a Network Management Tool Catalog: Tools for Monitoring and Debugging TCP/IP Internets and Interconnected Devices as an Informational document. o Mapping between X.400 (1984/1988) and Mail-11 (DECnet mail) as an Experimental Protocol. o Internet Users' Glossary as an Informational document. 5. Thirty-three (33) Internet Draft actions were taken during the month of January, 1993: (Revised draft (o), New Draft (+) ) WG I-D Title ------ -------------------------------------------------- (osids) o Using the OSI Directory to Achieve User Friendly Naming (dhc) o Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (x25mib) o SNMP MIB extension for MultiProtocol Interconnect over X.25 (osids) o A String Representation of Distinguished Names (osids) o Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (iplpdn) o Shortcut Routing: Discovery and Routing over Large Public Data Networks (atm) o Multiprotocol Interconnect over ATM Adaptation Layer 5 (iplpdn) o Directed ARP (dhc) o DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions (none) o Definitions of Managed Objects for the SONET Interface Type (dhc) o Interoperation Between DHCP and BOOTP (none) o TCP/IP: Internet Version 7 (tuba) o Use of ISO CLNP in TUBA Environments (userdoc2) o FYI on Introducing the Internet--A Short Bibliography of Introductory Internetworking Readings for the Network Novice (pip) o Pip Identifiers (mospf) o IP Multicast over Token-Ring Local Area Networks (trunkmib) o Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3/E3 Interface Type (trunkmib) o Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS1 and E1 Interface Types (smtpext) o Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8Bit-SMTP/MIME (none) + A Strategy for Encoding Hierarchical Addresses in Internet Name Services (none) o Internet Engineering Task Force Statements Of Policy (SOPs) (snmpsec) o Administrative Model for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (snmpsec) o Party MIB for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (snmpsec) o Security Protocols for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (x400ops) o Using the Internet DNS to maintain RFC1327 Address Mapping Tables (pppext) + PPP LCP Extensions (isis) + Use of OSI IS-IS for Routing in TCP/IP and Multi-Protocol Environments (iesg) + IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures (chassis) + Definitions of Managed Objects for a Chassis Containing Multiple Logical Network Devices (snmpsec) o Protocol Operations for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (iplpdn) + Multiprotocol Interconnect over Frame Relay Networks (snmpsec) o Manager to Manager Management Information Base (pip) + Use of DNS with Pip 6. Twenty-four (24) RFC's were published during the month of January, 1993. RFC St WG Title ------- -- -------- ------------------------------------- RFC1387 I (ripv2) RIP Version 2 Protocol Analysis RFC1388 PS (ripv2) RIP Version 2 Carrying Additional Information RFC1389 PS (ripv2) RIP Version 2 MIB Extension RFC1390 S (fddi) Transmission of IP and ARP over FDDI Networks RFC1391 I (none) The Tao of IETF: A Guide for New Attendees of the Internet Engineering Task Force RFC1392 I (userglos) Internet Users' Glossary RFC1393 E (none) Traceroute Using an IP Option RFC1394 I (none) Relationship of Telex Answerback Codes to Internet Domains RFC1395 I (none) BOOTP Vendor Information Extensions RFC1396 I (none) The Process for Organization of Internet Standards Working Group (POISED) RFC1397 PS (bgp) Default Route Advertisement In BGP2 And BGP3 Versions Of The Border Gateway Protocol RFC1398 DS (ethermib) Definitions of Managed Objects for the Ethernet-like Interface Types RFC1401 I (none) Correspondence between the IAB and DISA on the use of DNS throughout the Internet RFC1402 I (none) There's Gold in them thar Networks! Searching for Treasure in all the Wrong Places RFC1403 PS (bgp) BGP OSPF Interaction RFC1404 I (opstat) A Model for Common Operational Statistics RFC1405 E (x400ops) Mapping between X.400 (1984/1988) and Mail-11 (DECnet mail) RFC1406 PS (trunkmib) Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS1 and E1 Interface Types RFC1407 PS (trunkmib) Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3/E3 Interface Type RFC1408 PS (telnet) Telnet Environment Option RFC1409 E (telnet) Telnet Authentication Option RFC1411 E (telnet) Telnet Authentication: Kerberos Version 4 RFC1412 E (telnet) Telnet Authentication : SPX RFC1415 PS (app) FTP-FTAM Gateway Specification St(atus): ( S) Internet Standard (PS) Proposed Standard (DS) Draft Standard ( E) Experimental ( I) Informational Steve Coya (scoya@cnri.reston.va.us) Phill Gross (pgross@nis.ans.net) INTERNET PROJECTS ----------------- BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC. ---------------------------- Interdomain Policy Routing -------------------------- During the month of January, we have made significant progress in preparing for the Internet pilot demonstration of IDPR. Before deploying the IDPR pilot, it was necessary to modify the existing IDPR software in two ways. (1) We had to add to the route generation software the capability of accounting for source policies such as requested delay and bandwidth and domains to exclude from a route. This functionality has always been part of IDPR but was not available in the existing implementation. Ramanathan has now completed and tested his implementation of source policies for IDPR. (2) We also had to make one SPARCstation behave like three distinct policy gateways in three separate domains. Three of the transit domains that connect at the FIXes will participate in the IDPR pilot. However, none of their routers will be modified. Instead the policy gateways that act on their behalf will be located externally, in SPARCstations attached to the FIXes. We are only permitted to attach one SPARCstation to each FIX; hence, each such SPARCstation must be capable of acting as three separate policy gateways, one for each transit domain. Regina Rosales has been working on this problem and has successfully tested the case in which two policy gateways reside in a single SPARCstation. Real-Time Multicast Communications and Applications --------------------------------------------------- Introduction Last year, BBN began work on a project to investigate new approaches to distributed real-time communications and applications. This work was motivated by the wide variety of new applications (personal conferencing, networked distribution of continuous-feed news/video services, and distributed simulations) and new network capabilities (network-wide resource coordination) that have recently emerged. In the area of distributed real-time applications, BBN is working on enhancing an existing Video Information Server (VIS) to work over the Internet and will be using it to investigate key topics such as interactive use of distributed video servers and desktop video and shared workspace conferencing. One of the results of this work will be a distributed, replicated video information service that supports multiple geographically-separated clients. This service will feature: (A) fully digital delivery of compressed audio and video using multiple coding schemes (rates, encoding protocols, etc.); the servers and clients negotiate the choice of coding schemes based on currently available resources. (B) shared access to both stored and continuous feed audio and video information originating at multiple points in the Internet. For example, it will be possible to "look around" the network and join (under suitable access control) the video feed from a meeting or seminar in progress. (C) automatic self-configuration of the servers and survival in the event of failures of the replicated server resources. (D) optimal use of different communications bandwidths to different clients viewing the same video stream. In the communications area, BBN is developing several new communications services to provide the support needed for the Video Information Server and other distributed real-time applications. This work will result in: (A) resource coordination objects (RCO's) -- an abstraction that permits applications to perform conceptual operations on a group of network resources and gives the network access to information that allows it to make intelligent decisions. (B) anycasting -- the ability to address a replicated object and be directed to only the nearest/best one. (C) multi-level data flows -- a special case of resource coordination in which a group of information flows forms a whole, for example, different levels of hierarchically encoded video. (D) shared streams -- a mechanism with which applications can request multiplexing of reserved resources along overlapping parts of network paths that they are using. BBN will be using the DARTNET to develop and demonstrate these applications and networks capabilities. The following diagram illustrates the capabilities that will be available when the proposed work is complete. Video Information Desktop Video Library Regional Server 1 Video/SWS Viewing Client 1 Service | Conf 1 | Directory 1 | | | | | | | | +---+----LAN +---+----LAN +---+----LAN +---+----LAN | | | | | | | | ,* * * G * * * * * * * *G * * * * * * * * *G * * * * * * * *G *. * New Network Capabilities: * * > Client-controlled join/leave * * The Internet > Anycasting * * > Multi-level data flow support * * > Resource Coordination Objects * * > Shared Streams * `* * * G* * * * * * * * G * * * * * * * * *G * * * * * * * *G*' | | | | | | | | +---+----LAN +---+----LAN +---+----LAN +---+----LAN | | | | | | | | Regional Video Information Desktop Video Stream Service Directory Server 2 Video/SWS Viewing Client 2 Conf 2 G = Gateway/router Video/SWS = Video / Shared Workspace Conference Progress To Date In the applications area, we have made the following enhancements to an existing LAN-based Video Information Server (VIS) to enable it to work over a wide-area network -- a new video transport protocol based on the work of the IETF Audio/Video Transport Working Group; a distributed, self-configuring resource database; and a catalog of available video information. In the communications area, we have made significant progress on completing the implementation of "multi-level flows" and "anycasting" service. Coding and most of the testing have been completed for both of these. We anticipate final testing to be completed in early February. This will be followed by integration with the Video Information Server. Defense Simulation Internet (DSI) --------------------------------- Under a DARPA contract, BBN is developing the Defense Simulation Internet (DSI) by extending the Terrestrial Wideband Network (TWBNet) which it now replaces. The DSI is a cooperative effort between DARPA and DISA with the support of DMSO. It is intended to serve as a testbed for distributed simulation applications for the defense simulation community. This includes support of field training exercises, the modelling and evaluation of new systems, and the link between them. The DSI is a high-speed cell-oriented network backbone consisting of three interconnected segments that provide redundancy in the event of circuit failure. The two CONUS segments are T1 circuits; the European segment is a 512 Kbps circuit. BBN has implemented in DSI a version of the Internet ST (stream) protocol that supports real-time multi-site interactive simulation, multi-media conferencing, voice, and real-time image transmission. The multicast and resource allocation features of ST combined with IP provide an efficient way to dynamically multiplex real-time and non-real-time data traffic in a single communication system. BBN has also implemented an end-to-end security subnet by integrating Motorola's Network Encryption System (NES) into the network. This subnet carries data at the secret level. In order to increase the effective packet throughput of the NES, BBN developed and deployed packet aggregation software on the secure side of the network. The DSI supported several field training exercises in 1992, notably Ulchi Focus Lens (24-hours/day over three continents), Reforger, and War Breaker (with continuous throughput rates ranging up to 600 Kbps). To date, more than 50 sites have been installed in CONUS, Hawaii, Europe, and Korea; several more are in progress. Karen Seo CIX (COMMERCIAL INTERNET EXCHANGE) ---------------------------------- The following report outlines CIX-WEST usage for the month of December, 1992. CIX In Out Member Octets Packets Errors Octets Packets Errors --------------- ------------------------ --------- --------------- AlterNet 2.42e10 9.99e7 5.12e3 1.54e10 1.17e8 0.00e0 BARRNet/NEARNet 5.16e8 2.25e6 1.46e3 2.39e10 1.31e8 0.00e0 CERFNet 3.50e10 2.21e8 1.79e3 4.15e10 1.58e8 0.00e0 PSINet 3.50e10 1.74e8 4.30e1 2.09e10 1.05e8 2.40e1 SprintLink 9.41e9 2.94e7 5.39e3 1.76e9 1.12e7 0.00e0 Starting: Nov 30 1992 at 23:53 Ending: Dec 31 1992 at 23:53 SNMP Polling Intervals: 4721 SNMP Polling Frequency: 15 minutes In - traffic entering the CIX from the CIX member network Out - traffic exiting the CIX into the CIX member network ----- The following report outlines CIX-WEST usage for the month of January, 1993. CIX In Out Member Octets Packets Errors Octets Packets Errors --------------- ----------------------- ------------------------- AlterNet 2.28e10 1.03e8 7.85e3 1.38e10 1.09e8 0.00e0 BARRNet/NEARnet 9.01e8 4.11e6 6.53e3 3.28e10 1.38e8 0.00e0 CERFNet 2.79e10 1.68e8 1.09e3 3.17e10 1.31e8 0.00e0 PSINet 2.64e10 1.35e8 3.20e1 1.69e10 7.70e7 0.00e0 SprintLink 1.91e10 5.74e7 8.30e1 2.06e9 1.26e7 0.00e0 Starting: Dec 31 1992 at 23:53 Ending: Feb 1 1993 at 00:14 SNMP Polling Intervals: 4657 SNMP Polling Frequency: 15 minutes In - traffic entering the CIX from the CIX member network Out - traffic exiting the CIX into the CIX member network At the present time, approximately 1800 networks within the CIX membership are using the CIX-WEST. The CIX membership currently routing through CIX-WEST consists of: AlterNet CERFNet PSINet SprintLink The Nordic Carriers (via AlterNet) EUNET (via AlterNet) PIPEX (via AlterNet) BARRNet NEARNet Send mail to info@cix.org for information regarding the CIX. Mark Fedor fedor@psi.com ISI --- GIGABIT NETWORKING Infrastructure Trip Report ARRNET's Networkshop '92 Japan Network Information Center Meeting December 1992 Joyce K. Reynolds USC/Information Sciences Institute The Eighth Australian Networkshop (Networkshop '92) Networkshop '92 was held at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia from 2nd to 4th December 1992. It is the annual national workshop of the academic and research networking community. The workshop attracted over 440 participants involved in networking, computer-based communications, and usage of electronic communications from throughout Australia, New Zealand and around the world. The initial plenary consisted of a greeting by Professor B. Wilson, Vice Chancellor, UQ and opening remarks by Professor D. McNicol, Vice Chancellor, Sydney University. Joyce K. Reynolds was the Opening Keynote Speaker for the Networkshop presenting, "User Services Planning in the Internet". Her talk included a discussion of the role of the Internet Society, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and its User Services Area in the development of user services for Internet information providers. The talk reviewed the current efforts of fourteen active working groups, within the User Services Area of the IETF, their future plans and objectives. The RFC (Request for Comments) document series, and the FYI (For Your Information) series of notes was also be discussed. Peter Elford presented a talk on, "What is AARNet - A User's View". The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) is a data communications network which interconnects LANS, uses the Internet Protocol and is a part of the global Internet which currently consists of 1,300,000 host systems and 7-14 million users. AARNet provides infrastructural internetworking services to the national academic and research community, as well as connection services to sectors of the national and state governments and various governmental and commerical organizations. As of October 1992, AARNet consisted of 56,000 host connections, 300 member organizations, and approximately 250,000 users. AARNet is the largest and busiest non-US Internet. Other non-IP networks include BITNET, JANET, Compuserve, X.400, X.25, UUCP, and FidoNet. Electronic mail is the only common services between these networks. The Internet is a very valuable resource due to its connectivity and the vast resources of its members. The Internet provides a broad range of services, including remote login, electronic mail, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and News Information servers. There is a transparent LAN extension, and in many cases, the applications are free. AARNet's remote login is accomplished via Telnet, through the usual means of authentication. Remote login links users to library catalogues, databases and information services. AARNet utilizes anonymous FTP via a public access FTP server. No password is required. It provides the usual means of distributing and collecting information on the Internet. There can be incompatible file types. Therefore, AARNet's file name identifies the following types: .ps, .txt, .rtf compressors, .Z converter, .uu, .hqx archivers, .arc, .tar, .zoo, .sit AARNet's electronic mail is the most basic of all the network applications, with the widest possible reach and contrasts via its speed, synchronization, and conferencing capabilities. Further information on the AARNet Network is reachable at: +61 6 249 3385 +61 6 249 1369 (FAX) and via electronic mail to: aarnet@aarnet.edu.au Barbara Fraser presented a talk on, "The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and Internet Security". The CERT was born out of the Internet Worm in 1988. Three people were on staff at the CERT in 1988. Currently, 14 people are staffing the CERT. CERT offers a 24 hours point of contact, seven days a week, with its intent of helping victims in whatever level they need. In vendor relationships, the CERT not only assists top level vendors, but others on down the chain. CERT encourages the user community and consumers to build security into their plans at the start. The CERT IS NOT the Internet police. They do not "do" investigations into computer breakins. They do provide education and training and provide a number of documents and tools for the system administrator. It is impossible for one organization to respond to all needs. Computer incidents that were reported to the CERT when it was formed was one a day. This doubles each year. In 1988, the main "breakins" were exploiting passwords, or to exploit known vulnerabilities. The top five incidents include: exploiting passwords exploiting known vulnerabilities trusted system attacks TFTP attacks NIS attacks What should security policies address? acceptable use policy for users acceptable use policy of operations staff FYI 8, RFC 1244 (Holbrook, P., and J. Reynolds, Editors, "Site Security Handbook", July 1991) is a document that can assist in the development of appropriate security at a site. The point is to minimize the damage when the incident occurs. Ken Day presented a talk on, "Security and the Australian Federal Police". Federal Law works in all states in Australia. There is no individual state jurisdiction. The number one point is that computer systems in Australia are considered Commonwealth computer systems. This also applies to ANY computer system that contains information or data on behalf of the Commonwealth or at the direction of the Commonwealth. Computer restrictions and the crime that is directed against breakins are very broad. This also includes carriers of ALL Commonwealth carriers (phones, microwaves, etc.). Within the law, if convicted of an offense of a software violation, it is a minimum 6 months in prison. On the hardware side, it is punishable of up to 10 years in prison. Are there any requirements to to protect from intrusion? NO. What about CPU time? Waiting to see what the law says and what is currently being tested in the courts. Right now, there isn't a need. The Australian Federal Police have what is called "Section 7", which includes a lot of case law on what is considered to be an "attempt" to breakin. The best lesson is to automatically assume you are vulnerable, until proven otherwise. The spirit of cooperation includes the prompt action of the Australian Federal Police. Their track record is good, but pretty slow. The laws and administration of the Commonwealth of Australia are in control of the police department. An excellent paper of interest to the user services community was presented by Margaret Issacs, "Network Training and Related Issues", available via anonymous FTP from AARNET.EDU.AU, in /pub/networkshop92/papers. File name: Isaacs.ps. Also available is, "X.500 in Australia", by Andrew Waugh, which should interest the Directory Services/Information Services folks. File name: X500.ps. Barbara Fraser, Nathaniel Borenstein and Joyce K. Reynolds discussed the impact of electronic communications between children using MIME. Nathaniel noted that those who have access to the Internet can use MIME to communicate with other children not only educationally, but in establishing pen pal relationships, globally. Pictures can be sent with the MIME application along with exchanges of text in their native language. The Japan Network Information Center (JNIC) Committee Joyce K. Reynolds traveled to Tokyo, Japan to speak to Dr. Jun Murai, Mr. Masaki Hirabaru, and the JNIC committee. The JNIC Committee held meetings the third week in December at the University of Tokyo. Background on the Japan Network Information Center (JNIC) Because of the rapid escalation of the number of networks in Japan during the last few years, assignments and registrations for domain names and network numbers became too numerous to be carried out by voluntary groups. The processing delay of number assignments and domain registration began to block the growth of Japanese computer networks. Furthermore, users who planned to join the Japanese Internet did not have a general services point to ask questions. Network users sorely needed a repository for network related information. Technical administrators needed to obtain information about other networks whenever trouble occurred, but there was no such existing database. The technical body of the Japan Committee of Research Networks (JCRN) discussed these needs and proposed the establishment of a network information center for Japanese computer networks. The Japan Network Information Center (JNIC) started its operation on December 1, 1991. Its intent is to assign numbers, administrate names, and provide information services. JNIC works with the cooperation of all related network projects in Japan. Quick response and fairness are the most important requirements. The current administrative roles of JNIC are as follows: - IP network number assignments for Japan - JP domain name allocation - JP name server administration Criteria for number assignments and allocation is clearly defined and published. This makes the processes simple to respond quickly and informs applicants of their own rights and responsibilities. Information such as domain names, IP network numbers, name servers, contact persons, and network projects are collected into the JNIC database to be retrieved via a WHOIS service. JNIC cooperates with the Internet NIC to keep the database consistent. Current information services of JNIC are: - documentation distribution (FTP, Email, and postal mail) - WHOIS services (experimental) Most of the documentation is currently written in Japanese, but English versions are being prepared for Internet users. The JNIC WHOIS services provide similar functions to the DDN NIC WHOIS. JNIC provides on-line services on NIC.AD.JP and is reachable at JNIC@NIC.AD.JP. They are currently trying to concentrate all the information about Japanese networks available in the NIC.AD.JP machine, so that it can be accessed via various standard methods including anonymous FTP. Joyce K. Reynolds attended the JNIC Committee's meeting at the University of Tokyo. She presented to the committee and invited guests, "User Services Planning in the Internet". She discussed with the group the future role of the yet unannounced National Science Foundation's (NSF) "InterNICs", the role and function of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and the RFC series of notes. The RFC subseries of notes (For Your Information - FYI, and Standard - STD) and RFC document processing were discussed. A query was asked by the participants regarding when the RFC Editor would publish RFCs in the Japanese language. Joyce expressed that during her trip to a RARE meeting in Europe, David Sitman of Israel (EARN) had the same query about publishing RFC documents in Hebrew. Joyce stated that English will still be the "official" publication language of RFCs. It is up to each country to identify and translate particular RFCs of interest into their native language. Joyce made mention that an example of this is currently going on in Czechoslovakia. Jan Gruntorad, head of Czech FESnet, was a guest at a meeting that was held at Information Sciences Institute last October 23rd. Jan expressed the importance of the user services work going on in the IETF and how it has helped his colleagues in Czechoslovakia. They have specifically been taking various documents of interest in the FYI RFC series of notes and translating them into the native Czech language. This helps students learn more about the Internet. Glenn Mansfield & Thomas Johannsen presented a talk on Intelligent Network Management and charting networks in the X.500 Directory. They have been working on this project for the last nine months, with funding from the Widely Integrated Distributed Environment project (WIDE). Currently, there is a vast information crunch. In the beginning, the Internet was a small world, but now there are many, too many things going on in the Internet. What we need is a map (like a road map). We need PHYSICAL picture of the network. The road map analogy - how to reach places. Speed limits, restaurant/restrooms, McDonalds, police-boxes, etc.. While there are already network maps, like the WIDE maps and various global Internet Maps, these maps change a lot. We are still in the primitive stages of how these maps can be organized. If we utilize a network map the appropriate way, it can be for several purposes: configuration management root management fault management service management There is an enormous amount of information diversity. When one accesses the NIP.AD.JP or the NIC.DDN.MIL, one is looking for information. There is a MASSIVE DIVERSITY of information. The information is different at different sites because updates take place at different times. It is quasi static, unweilding, and growing to a point where it is almost unmanageable. Glenn Mansfield presented a talk on, "A Unified View - Using X.500 Directory Services". The primary requirement is to experiment on X.500 for this type of service until something better comes up. In the directory tree, start at the top level, mapping one by one; root, country, localities, organizations, units (already existing). Quipu exercise is interesting, but new - network focus - physical images, functional images. How to present into a directory. Examples - leave the schema for another time. The ConMan Project - network configuration manual The ConMan Project at AIC System Laboratories and Tohoku University is investigating some of the following areas in relation to a network map pilot. Furthermore, a global network information base can be used for: Services management: Locate various services and servers in the network. Optimization: The information available can be used to carry out various optimizations. For example, cost, traffic, response time, etc. Provide mappings between the various names and addresses of elements. Depict administrative/automonous domains. Network Administration and Management: References to people responsible for administering and technically maintaining a network will be useful. ConMan Project - related to network management and a network management framework - complex window dumps. Click on window to get more information, using a standard directory user agent. Envision a system with management applications. Everything under one roof of the directory. SoftPages Project - optimize document retrieval The Soft Pages Project at Tohoku University, AIC System Laboratories and WIDE explores a way to optimize document retrieval by using a "shortest" way approach. SoftPages - cost computation - efficiently use the system - no cost calculation of FTP retrieval. If they have a network map, they can tell the server, speeds of the traffic, etc.. Cost is calculated as follows: cost = f(speed, traffic, charge, priority) cost = a*(1/speed) + b*traffic + c*charge + d*(1/priority) c*(1/traffic) File server contents mirrored in the directory - not smart files in different places. Glenn and Thomas have also been in active discussions with Mark Knopper of Merit. Present status: network map for configuration management distributed database for world wide map many services and systems possible distributed framework Future Status: problem of scalability pilot implementation on a draft proposal net map displayed cost based network retrieve is being suggested more applications coming up Wide area NIC database: Have the uniformity and cooperation with other NICs. Working on more DSAs. More user agent experience and nice applications. Timeframe: early March. NIC & X.500 DSAs: DSA on the NIC - but managed (one part) by a network manager and one organizational ISODE package. The JNIC committee held a question and answer session regarding the discussion. How should the JNIC jointly work with this project? It is up to the JNIC. Where to locate the database? Usually cannot access a distributed database. This needs a well thought out framework. The access to the database must be taken care of. This is an interesting proposal for the JNIC. Which is better? To centralize or distribute the system? What kind of information is needed for a map? How big an information system is needed for the information? Glenn's response is that the first step may not be very detailed. Using current the NIC information, using a basic framework, and transferring from one database to another needs to be researched. Work on this can be accomplished by sending out a questionnaire. Jun Murai and Joyce K. Reynolds met to discuss the A-P NIC (Asia- Pacific), currently under consideration by the Asia-Pacific Rim Internet communities. Criteria focused on funding for supporting the JNIC in its future capacity as the A-P NIC. The JNIC currently has continuous funding via WIDE, and Jun felt most of the potential problems of the new A-P NIC could be solved with funding. He is currently working on the allocation of numbers and charging a fee for network numbers. Joyce and Jun discussed the similarities of the DDN NIC, the RIPE NCC and the proposed A-P NIC. They also discussed the crucial interaction and cooperation with the IANA. Jun expressed that his intent is to set up a proposed criteria and if it hits a grey area, it goes to a relevant mailing list. GIX will be used for database routing - domestic on policy based routing. GIX experiments are contingent on a consensus with Daniel Karrenberg of the RIPE NCC and the IEPG. There will be a meeting regarding the A-P NIC at the University of Hawaii the second week of January. Joyce Reynolds (jkrey@isi.edu) 24 RFCs were published this month. RFC 1387: Malkin, G., "RIP Version 2 Protocol Analysis", Xylogics Inc., January 1993. RFC 1388: Malkin, G., "RIP Version 2 Carrying Additional Information", Protocol Analysis", Xylogics Inc., January 1993. RFC 1389: Malkin, G., (Xylogics Inc.) and F. Baker, (Advanced Computer Communications) "RIP Version 2 MIB Extension", January 1993. RFC 1390: Katz, D., "Transmission of IP and ARP over FDDI Networks" Cisco Systems, Inc., January 1993. RFC 1391: Malkin, G., "The TAO of IETF - A Guide for New Attendees of the Internet Engineering Task Force", Xylogics Inc., January 1993. RFC 1392: Malkin, G., (Xylogics Inc.) and T. LaQuey Parker, (Utexas) "Internet Users' Glossary", January 1993. RFC 1393: Malkin, G., "Traceroute Using an IP Option", Xylogics Inc., January 1993. RFC 1394: Robinson, P., "Relationship of Telex Answerback Codes to Internet Domains", Tansin A. Darcos and Co., January 1993. RFC 1395: Reynolds, J.K., " BOOTP Vendor Information Extensions", USC/ISI, January 1993. RFC 1396: Crocker, S., "The Process for Organization of Internet Standards Working Group (POISED" Trusted Information Systems, Inc., January 1993. RFC 1397: Haskin, D., "Default Route Advertisement in BGP2 And BGP3 Versions of The Border Gateway Protocol" Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., January 1993. RFC 1398: Kastenholz, F., "Definitions of Managed Objects for the Ethernet-like Interface Types", January 1993.. RFC 1401: Internet Architecture Board, Lyman Chapin, Chair, "Correspondence between the IAB and DISA on the use of DNS throughout the Internet", January 1993. RFC 1402: Martin, J., "There's Gold in Them Thar Neworks! or Searching for Treasure in all the Wrong Places", Ohio State University, January 1993. RFC 1403: Varadhan, K., "BGP OSPF Interaction", OARnet, January 1993. RFC 1404: Stockman, B., "A Model for Common Operational Statistics", NORDUnet/SUNET, January 1993. RFC 1405: Allocchio, C., "Mapping between X.400(1984/1988) and Mail-11 (DECnet mail)", I.N.F.N. - Italy, January 1993. RFC 1406: Baker, F., (Advanced Computer Communications), J. Watt, (Newbridge Networks Corporation) Editors, January 1993. RFC 1407: Cox, T., and K. Tesink "Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3/E3 Interface Type", Bell Communications Research January 1993. RFC 1408: Borman, D., "Telnet Environment Option", Cray Research, Inc., January 1993. RFC 1409: Borman, D., "Telnet Authentication Option", Cray Research, Inc., January 1993. RFC 1411: Borman, D., "Telnet Authentication: Kerberos Version 4", Cray Research, Inc., January 1993. RFC 1412: Alagappan, K., "Telnet Authentication: SPX", Digital Equipment Corporation", January 1993. RFC 1415: Mindel, J., and R. Slaski, "FTP-FTAM Gateway Specification", Open NEtworks, Inc., January 1993. Ann Westine Cooper (Cooper@ISI.EDU) MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING Internet packet audio and video tools such as INRIA's IVS, LBL's vat, PARC's nv, and UMass' NEVOT have become quite popular over the past year. Combined with LBL's Session Directory tool (sd), these programs implement a "loose control" style of session management that is particularly appropriate for large "seminar" events such as the IETF audio/videocasts. For smaller conferences with an explicit set of participants, a "tight control" style of session management that exchanges state information among the participants can add several useful services, including: - an explicit request for participation by a callee, perhaps with a small pop-up window, and an explicit reply (no answer, busy/refuse, accept); - key exchange to implement security measures such as authentication of conferees and data confidentiality and integrity; - negotiation of session parameters, such as selecting a compatible compression algorithm and data rate. To allow the same audio and video tools to be used with both loose- and tight-control session management, we have begun to modify our conference control program, MMCC, to invoke these tools in addition to our VT and PVP tools that we have used previously for experiments using both ST-II and IP multicast. MMCC will implement session key exchange to be coupled with DES encryption in vat or other tools to achieve confidentiality of the data stream. As a first step, the session key may be protected only by a manually prearranged private key, but for the longer term we are investigating how to integrate mechanisms such as those in PEM or Kerberos with MMCC's reliable control communication paths. To go beyond confidentiality, we are working to identify the range of security threats that may exist for applications such as conferencing and to prioritize the utility and implementability of security services to combat them. To implement these services will likely require a more sophisticated interface between session management and the audio/video tools than simple program initiation; we are also studying these interface requirements. Steve Casner, Eve Schooler (casner@ISI.EDU, schooler@ISI.EDU) JVNCNET ------- JvNCnet-Global Enterprise Services, Inc. B6 von Neumann Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544; 1-800-35-TIGER I. New Information A. New on-line members (fully operational January 93) Association of American Medical Colleges, Washington, DC Bibliomation, Stratford, CT Computer Command and Control Company, Phila., PA. Focused Research International, Inc., Leonardtown,MD Materials and Technologies, Hopewell Junction, NY A. Patrizio, Stamford, CT Pepsi-Cola, Somers, NY The Radburn Group, Fair Lawn, NJ WakeUp, Red Bank,NJ B. Weger, Yardville, NJ II. Symposia Series A. Internet Resources and Applications Symposium February 19, 1993, 8:45 am to approx. 4:30 pm Princeton Marriott Forrestal Village, 201 Village Rd., Plainsboro, NJ. Via U. S. Rt. 1, get off at College Road - Forrestal Village exit, and follow signs to Marriott. (5 min. north of Princeton on U.S. Rt. 1) The symposium is targeted to new and intermediate Internet users and anyone interested in learning about the benefits of Internet communications. A panel of experts will discuss on-line resources, Internet functions such as file transfer, remote computing, new network tools to locate and deliver distributed information. Guest speakers include: Steve Burdick, MERIT, Inc.; Dan Oberst, Princeton University; John Garrett, CNRI; David Rodgers, Amer. Math. Society; Martin Loveless, Mead Data Central, Dr. David Magier, Columbia University. $275.00 is the cost for all non-JvNCnet member registrations received before February 9, 1993. Early bird registration for JvNCnet members is $250 also by February 9. Fee includes lunch and a reference book. To register or to receive the complete agenda, contact Rochelle Hammer at 609-258-2409 or send electronic mail inquiries to hammer@jvnc.net. B. March, 1993 'Introduction to Protocols' sequence of courses. Seminars 2 and 3 will include discussion on interconnectivity to TCP/IP.Audience: Network operations technicians and systems administrators responsible for managing a site's network and implementing decision-making. It is also relevant for personnel who support TCP/IP, Novell or DECnet users and manage network resources. 1. March 16 - Introduction to Data Communications and TCP/IP 2. March 17 - An Introduction to Netware (Novell) Protocols 3. March 18 - Introduction to DECnet (Digital) Protocols For further information about the March seminars or to add your name to the symposia mailing list, send email to hammer@jvnc.net. by Rochelle Hammer (hammer@jvnc.net). NEARNET (NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK) --------------------------------------------------- As of January 28, 1993, NEARnet has grown to a total of 188 member organizations. During the week of January 11th, several NEARnet representatives participated in the Networld '93 Conference which was held at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Massachusetts. NEARnet provided the Internet connection for the Novell, Inc. and NEARnet conference booths. Hundreds of people stopped by the NEARnet booth to learn more about NEARnet and the Internet. John Curran of the NEARnet Staff presented a discussion on library access to the Internet at the NERCOMP Resources Seminar in Waltham, Massachusetts on January 8. The December issue of the "NEARnet This Month" bulletin has been distributed. Past issues are available via anonymous FTP at nic.near.net, in the directory newsletters/nearnet-this-month. by Corinne Carroll NORTHWESTNET In addition to the many operational activities in January 1993, the NorthWestNet staff were busy presenting at a wide variety of meetings throughout the country. Among these presentations were the following: "Bridging Challenges and Opportunities: Regional Networks and Internet Access for Libraries" Dr. Eric S. Hood, Executive Director, NorthWestNet January 23, 1993 American Library Association Midwestern Meeting Denver, CO "Transition to the Next Generation NSFNET" Dan Jordt, Dir. of Technical Services, NorthWestNet January 21, 1993 MERIT's Annual Regional Technical Meeting Boulder, CO "Enabling Education through National Networking" Jan Eveleth, Dir. of User Services, NorthWestNet January 30, 1993 Northwest Council for Computer Education '93 Portland, OR ----------------- NorthWestNet info@nwnet.net 15400 SE 30th Place, Suite 202 Phone: (206) 562-3000 Bellevue, WA 98007 Fax: (206) 562-4822 Dr. Eric S. Hood, Executive Director Jan Eveleth, Director of User Services Dan L. Jordt, Director of Technical Services Anthony Naughtin, Manager of Member Relations NorthWestNet serves the six state region of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, and Washington. by Jan Eveleth NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC. ---------------------------------------- NNSC Transition --------------- The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently awarded the Network Information Services Manager(s) solicitation to three organizations. General Atomics, which currently operates CERFnet and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, will provide INTERNIC Information Services for the NSFNET and the NREN. Network Solutions which has been involved in operating the DDN NIC since 1992 will provide registration services. AT&T will provide directory and database services. This award expands the scope of services which have previously been supplied by several parties, including the NSF Network Service Center (NNSC). The combined Network Information Services Managers will assume responsibility for providing these services. The NNSC is assisting in this transition. THE SCIENTIST Update -------------------- The latest issue of THE SCIENTIST is available via anonymous FTP at nnsc.nsf.net, in the directory named "the-scientist". This directory is also available via the NNSC Info-Server, an automated program which delivers information via electronic mail. To receive the help file for the Info-Server, in addition to an index and an overview of "the-scientist" directory, send mail to: info-server@nnsc.nsf.net. In the body of the message type the lines: Request: the-scientist Topic: help Topic: index Topic: overview Request: end Information contained within "the-scientist" directory on the nnsc.nsf.net machine may now also be searched and retrieved via WAIS servers. Corinne Carroll NSFNET/ANSNET BACKBONE ENGINEERING ---------------------------------- Network Status Summary ====================== The NSFNET Regional-Techs met in Boulder, CO on January 21-22 to discuss several topics, notibly issues relating to the implementation of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR). It is critical that Merit work together with the regionals and other network providers toward the goal of conserving routing table size and IP network numbers. The dismantling of the T1 NSS equipment at each regional network site will begin in February. Internal ANSnet routing stability continues to exceed 99%. We continue to collect both internal and external routing stability information for engineering analysis. New router software support is being deployed to better support multihomed client networks, and networks that peer with a single ENSS across both FDDI and ethernet. Testing and planning continued in January for the deployment of the new AIX 3.2 operating system on the RS/6000 routers, which begins in March. Backbone Traffic and Routing Statistics ======================================= The total inbound packet count for the T3 Backbone (measured using SNMP interface counters) was 24,015,504,082 up 9.1% from December. As of January 31, the number of networks configured in the NSFNET Policy Routing Database was 9118 for the T3 backbone. Of these, 1950 were never announced to the T3 backbone. The maximum number of networks announced to the T3 backbone during the month (from samples collected every 15 minutes) was 6537. Average announced networks on 1/31 were 6503. Merit is working with the regionals to reduce the number of "silent" nets in the policy routing database. The overall average number of networks announced via the primary configured AS path was around 88% in January. Graphs of this information are available for anonymous ftp on merit.edu, in pub/nsfnet/offnet, as postscript files. NSFNET Regional-Techs Meeting ============================= Merit sponsored a meeting of the NSFNET Regional-Techs in Boulder, Colorado during January 21-22, 1993. The meeting was generously hosted by Roy Perry of US West. Most of the regionals and midlevels were represented, along with commercial network service providers, router vendors, government agency network providers and NSF. The purpose of the meeting was to allow the regional-techs to get together and have a focused discussion about networking plans. The Internet is evolving and direct action by the network operators and router vendors needs to take place in the near term (6-8 months) in order to provide a network architecture that allows for expected growth rates. Last November, The Internet Engineering Task Force discussions indicated that the NSFNET Backbone Service and regional networks should move quickly to implement CIDR. The topics covered in the meeting were: 1) GIX, NAPs, Route Servers (discussion led by Elise Gerich of Merit); 2) Implementation of CIDR and Supernetting (led by Vince Fuller of BARRnet); 3) Address allocation strategies with CIDR (led by Dan Long of NEARnet); 4) Transition to "Next Generation NSFNET" (led by Dan Jordt of NorthWestNet); 5) Current Status /Problems (led by Mark Knopper); and 6) Virtual Routes (led by Bilal Chinoy of SDSC). A more detailed summary of the meeting will soon be available from Merit. CIDR/Supernetting Implementation ================================ Resulting from the meeting discussion there are several action items for implementation of CIDR and supernetting. These include pruning the "silent nets" from the NSFNET Policy Routing Database (PRDB), developing an agreement for adding new networks to the database, and having regionals obtain a CIDR block of class C addresses for their customers. Merit, IBM and ANS are working on implementation of BGP-4, a configuration scheme to handle route aggregation, as well as the capability of internally aggregating routing information. Merit has started a project to analyze the PRDB to look for networks that are not being announced to the backbone. Merit has been sending each regional/AS administrator lists of the "silent nets" for their autonomous system. Since routers in networks carrying full routing information (such as the ANSnet ENSS and CNSS nodes) support only a finite number of networks in their tables, it makes sense to prune out of the database any networks not being used and not expected to be used in the near future. We would like the database to reflect more closely the actual or current state of network announcements in the Internet. At this writing there have been indications that 142 network numbers can be deleted. Regionals have agreed to apply for blocks of continuous, bit- aligned class C network numbers for assignment to member or affiliate networks. This will allow routing information for new networks to be aggregated once CIDR is implemented. When class B networks must be used, eg. in the interim before CIDR, where many networks are coming online at once subnetting should be used to conserve routing table space. Regionals should avoid requesting network numbers to be added to the PRDB until just before they are expected to be actually announced. Finally, an Internet Draft is being written by Yakov Rekhter (IBM) and Claudio Topolcic (CNRI), called "Exchanging Routing Information across Provider/Subscriber boundaries in CIDR environment". T1 NSS Dismantling ================== Starting in the second half of February, as part of the T1 NSFNET NSS Dismantling Plan, IBM Customer Engineers will be visiting each of the NSFNET sites in order to dismantle the existing router equipment used to support the T1 backbone network, which was disconnected in December '92. For the purpose of serving OSI Encapsulation requirements, two RT machines equipped with one set of monitor and keyboard will remain on-site. The details of this plan have been discussed with the various regional technical site contacts. Routing Software and Stability on the T3 Network ================================================ The ANSnet internal routing stability report summarizes outages based on number and duration of the IBGP disconnects using methods described in the December '92 report. The internal routing stability data should not be confused with availability or uptime. For example, ENSS206 experienced down time due to a T1 circuit failure, but there were no routing transitions involved, so this was not credited as instable routing time. The data for January indicates good internal routing stability. The entire ANS network achieved better than 99% stability (no BGP disconnects anywhere in the network 99% of the time). This includes routing disconnects due to configuration changes and scheduled maintenance. Only 4 nodes experienced less than 99.9% stability. ENSS143 due to intermittent circuit problems that were traced to local telco equipment on the campus. ENSS150, ENSS152, and ENSS206 saw between 99.84% to 99.87% instability (about 1 hour of instability all month). ENSS150 suffered one 41 minute outage due to DSU equipment failure. ENSS206 (Geneva) suffered from trouble with the T1 circuit which was repaired. ENSS152 had power problems at the site. All other nodes reported 99.9% stability or better over the course of the month. The external stability reports indicate that during January, 211,763 BGP updates were received from 490 distinct AS paths. These updates contained 622,375 network numbers (or an average of 2.9 networks per update or 1270.2 updates per AS path). There were 1,613 distinct network numbers. The most unstable network during this period was contained in 6,278 unreachables. The average network was declared unreachable 385 times during the month and the worst-case was declared unreachable 6,278 times during the month. Routing Software Change for FDDI/Ethernet Configurations ======================================================== Several ENSS routers now have FDDI cards installed. A common configuration involves a single peer router that interconnects to the ENSS using both the FDDI and ethernet interface. The intention is to use the faster FDDI as primary and the ethernet as a backup. Two commonly asked questions are: 1. "Does the ENSS respect EGP external metrics or BGP interAS metrics sent by the peer routers?". The answer is "yes" for EGP and BGP. 2. "How do I configure my router to send a different EGP external metric or BGP interAS metric for each interface?". The answer is "you can't" for several peer routers. Several peer routers don't support two interfaces bordering the same AS to advertise different EGP external metrics, or BGP interAS metrics. ENSS software and configuration changes have been implemented to provide an EGP external metric or BGP interAS metric on a per interface basis. On the ENSS configuration file, if "validate" is not set on the "neighbor" lines, "metricin" currently provides the policy metric on a per AS basis. Previously "metricin" served no purpose if "validate" was used. Now, if "validate" is used, "metricin" will serve as a bias, added to the EGP external metrics provided as EGP distances in EGP updates, and bias the BGP interAS metric or provide a default BGP interAS metric if none is provided in a BGP update. This method allows the FDDI to be preferred over the ethernet in both directions, and requires no changes to the software on peer routers. By providing a bias, it also handles the case where multiple peer routers want to split load over the FDDI and use an ethernet as a backup for each router. Multiple AS's for Multi-Homed Peer Networks ========================================== Several customers that peer with ANSnet at multiple ENSS locations have asked why we assign a unique AS to the client for each unique ENSS rather than having only one AS number announce the system to ANSnet. It is possible to have only one AS announce the system. Both the Policy Routing Database and rcp_routed routing software can support it. The drawback is that ANSnet routes the nearest exit point to the AS rather than to the exit point designated as primary. This is a consequence of using "region" routes. If there are two exit points to a region, any given ANSnet node will route everything destined for that region on the one route it has to the region. The advantage of this is that it reduces the number of forwarding table changes required during an interior routing transient. As an example, consider the following picture: AS 6 / ENSS5 <---> CNSS10 <---> CNSS20 ^-------> CNSS11 <-------^ AS 6 is host to 1000 IP networks. CNSS10 is the primary path from CNSS20 to ENSS5. If we had a flat (one stage) lookup table, CNSS20 would have 1000 networks pointing to CNSS10 as the next hop. If CNSS10 goes down, we make 1000 changes to those routes, making CNSS11 the next hop. With a two stage lookup, we normally have 1000 networks claiming to be part of AS 6, and we have one route for AS 6 listing CNSS10 as its next hop. If CNSS10 goes down, we make 1 change to that route, making CNSS11 the next hop. The drawback is that a router can't distinguish between different exit points of the same AS. We implement the routing policy by determining the shortest path to a peer for any given network and then setting that exit point to our AS the primary, and so on for secondary, tertiary, etc. So we want to keep the ANSnet feature for policy routing, although the extra AS numbers should be extraneous and we have work in progress that will eliminate the need for it. With the upcoming AIX 3.2 software deployment, we will replace region routes with network routes. Rcp_routed software will still use regions for the forwarding. Shortly after AIX 3.2 deploys we expect to be using GATED. At that time ANSnet could support a multihomed AS without loss of policy capability. RS960 FDDI Deployment Status ============================ During the month of December, we installed RS960 FDDI adapters at ENSS131 (Ann Arbor - 1/8 Installed). During February we are scheduled to install FDDI adapters on ENSS141 (Boulder), and ENSS142 (WestNet). CNSS97 Problems =============== We have experienced three failures during January with the CNSS97 (Denver) router which results in the reset of several T3 interfaces. This causes the ENSS141, ENSS142 nodes to fallback to the T1 backup paths. We have scheduled hardware maintenance for this router in early February to correct this problem. We will rehome ENSS141, ENSS142 to another CNSS during this maintenance. AIX 3.2 Migration Plan Status ============================= System testing continued in January. Several problems were identified and fixed, although the deployment has been delayed as a result. The software will be installed on the testnet in early February for final system testing prior to deployment in early March. We will be in contact with each ENSS client in February to plan for this deployment. New ANSnet Nodes Installed in January ===================================== ENSS Customer Access Date Active ---- -------- ------ ----------- E211/E212 Dow Chemical 2xT1 01/05 E216 Motorola 56K 01/05 E210 US Senate 56K 01/08 E213 ISSC T1 01/12 E215 RIS 56K 01/19 E217 ANS Back-up 56K 01/27 Mark Knopper (mak@merit.edu) Jordan Becker (becker@ans.net) NSFNET/INFORMATION SERVICES --------------------------- A new version of the internet draft "FYI on Introducing the Internet--A Short Bibliography of Introductory Internetworking Readings for the Network Novice" is now available. The authors, Ellen Hoffman, manager of Merit Network's Information Services, and Lenore Jackson, of the NASA Ames Research Center, have cited more newly published materials including the "Internet Users' Glossary" and "The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking." The Short Bibliography and the resources available at no charge online via the Internet that it cites, may be obtained from nic.merit.edu in the directory /introducing.the.internet using Anonymous FTP. An access guide to /introducing.the.internet describes the resources and several methods for retrieving them: Anonymous FTP, electronic mail query, archie, Gopher and WAIS. The access.guide is available via e-mail by sending a message to nis- info@nic.merit.edu with the first line of the text of the message send access.guide A panel of archie, Gopher and WAIS experts will be a special feature of the Merit Networking Seminar, March 15-16, at the San Francisco Airport Hilton. Alan Emtage, co-creator of archie; Mark McCahill, Gopher project leader; and George Bret, National WAIS Clearinghouse; will discuss "Information Delivery on the Internet- -Present and Future." Featured speakers at "Making Your Internet Connection Count: Technology Tools & Resources" will include Tom Grundner, creator of the Cleveland Freenet; Perry Samson, U-M Weather Underground; Jean Armour Polly, Director of Information Services, NYSERNET, Inc.; and Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information. Hosted by BARRNET, the Merit Networking Seminar is a comprehensive forum intended for beginning and intermediate network users. A three-hour hands-on tutorial will be held in conjunction with the seminar at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. Merit staff will introduce participants to telnet, file transfer, and the latest in user friendly interfaces: Gopher, archie, and WAIS. A text-only version of the brochure is available via Anonymous FTP to nic.merit.edu as the file /nsfnet/seminar.brochure.march93. An electronic mail message to nis-info@nic.merit.edu with the first line of text send seminar.brochure.march93 will also retrieve the brochure. Requests for hardcopy brochures and more information may be made to seminar@merit.edu or 313/936- 3000. The NSFNET Regional Techs meeting sponsored by Merit and hosted by US West in Boulder, CO, during January 21 and 22 was attended by commercial network service providers, router vendors, government agency network providers and NSF, as well as most regionals and midlevels. Direct action by network operators and router vendors is necessary in the next six to eight months to provide a network architecture which allows for the expected growth rate of the evolving Internet. The purpose of the meeting was to provide a forum for focused discussion about networking plans among the regional techs. IETF discussions last November recommended the implementation of a "Classless Inter-Domain Routing" architecture on the NSFNET Backbone Service and regional networks, which would change the nature of routing protocols and the interaction between routing domains. Vince Fuller, BARRNET, led the discussion on the implementation of CIDR, and Dan Long, NEARnet, pursued CIDR address allocation strategies. Transition to the "Next Generation NSFNET" was a topic for discussion by Dan Jordt, NorthWestNet, with Peter Ford of the NSF Network Engineering Group presenting an overview of the upcoming solicitation for the follow-on NSFNET architecture. Elise Gerich, Merit, spoke on "GIX, NAPs and Route Servers" in the context of experiments to verify the technology and upcoming activities to support routing on this network. An overview of the NSFNET network status, including the dismantling of the T1 backbone and deployment of FDDI cards, was presented by Mark Knopper, Merit. FARNET convened in Denver, with Eric Aupperle, President of Merit Network, Inc.; Jim Williams, Merit Associate Director for National Networking; and Jeff Ogden, Merit/MichNet Associate Director attending. Chris Weider represented Merit's information delivery initiatives at the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) sponsored meeting in Denver, which explored the issues surrounding data elements for electronic resources and U.S. MARC standards. Jo Ann Ward (jward@merit.edu) UCL ---- Since the last report, dated 18th November 1992, the MICE Project (Multimedia International Conferencing for Europe) has officially started, and has performed its first demonstration of video from H.261 codecs across the EuropaNet (European Multi-Protocol Backbone), between the DFN Showcase in Bonn, and the Department of Computer Science at UCL. For this demonstration we used a SparcStation IPC with Sun HSI board and a GPT System 261 video codec at each site. Our original plans to transmit the stream over EuropaNet using UDP had to be modified when network throughput/delay tests revealed there to be periodic (every minute, then 20 seconds later) delay spikes of around 2 seconds, with accompanying high rates of packet loss. The data stream from the codec is H.261 video, with H.221 serial line protocol framing. If we suffer packet loss, the codec loses H.221 (and H.261) synchronisation, and then takes around 10 seconds to regain synchronisation. Clearly, over a network with these characteristics, with fixed bit rate data from the codec, UDP will not provide us with continuous video. For the purposes of this demonstration (and due in part to the short timescales involved), we decided that with enough buffering to allow for retransmissions, TCP would be a better option. We also modified TCP to reduce the effects of slow start and to maintain a suitable window size, thus reducing the recovery time after one of these delay/loss spikes. The results of this were a successful demonstration, with continuous video for the 20 minutes of the demonstration. Clearly however, even a modified TCP is not really appropriate for this sort of fixed data rate traffic, if we require minimal latency. In this case, the demonstration was a talk, so the problems of interactivity with large buffers was reduced. We are addressing alternative approaches in a number of ways: o We can perform H.221 frame alignment in software on the transmitting SparcStation, and packetise the video in H.221 sub-multiframes. Thus when, as with UDP, a packet is lost, we can reconstruct a dummy sub-multiframe at the receiver to prevent the codec losing H.221 synchronisation. This should reduce the re-synchronisation time, but is likely to cause quite severe image corruption due to the lack of synchronisation between H.261 and H.221 frames. However, this approach may still be useful, as we can then request a intra-coded frame, so the corruption should be transient. o However we do not really believe that we should be packetising H.221 frames at all, but rather we should be sending raw H.261 video, which is asynchronous in nature. This is made simplest if the codec manufacturers can be persuaded to break raw H.261 out of their equipment without H.221 framing. To this end, we are currently talking to GPT, to see whether they would supply us with access to the raw H.261 frames, and to Bitfield - who already have an appropriate Codec (though unfortunately only as a PC card). PictureTel and VideoTel currently do not seem to be interested in doing this, as the packet video community still does not appear to be taken seriously. It appears likely that in the short term at least, we will have to interwork with codecs providing H.221 framing, and so we are writing software to strip off H.221 framing, transmit the raw H.261 video, and reconstruct H.221 framing at the remote site. This also gives us more sensible packetisation options, which will minimise the image corruption due to packet loss. For the MICE project, UCL has the responsibility of providing the mixing and multiplexing hub for multi-way conferences. Currently the only way to do this at reasonable quality is to allocate a codec for each remote site. Clearly this is rather expensive. We are planning to investigate the rate at which we can decode an H.261 signal in software on fast Sparc machines (currently a SparcStation 10/30, later a 690). This aim of this is to eventually decode up to four incoming H.261 video streams, and mix (quad-multiplex) them in software, then recode the mixed video using a codec, and multicast the resultant stream back to all sites. THE PACKET VIDEO CONFERENCE AND RELATED ACTIVITY Handley and Kirstein attended the Packet Video conference at Raleigh. They distributed a paper on MICE there, which is being sent to you by separate message. It became clear that it would be impractical to interwork with the MCNC community in the near future, because they did not have the appropriate multimedia infrastructure according to any recognised standard - they were working with proprietary vendors' equipment. However, DoE retiterated that they planned to have some H.261 facilities available by the summer. John Crowcroft (j.crowcroft@CS.UCL.AC.UK) CALENDAR -------- Readers are requested to send in dates of events that are appropriate for this calendar section. Please send your submissions to (cooper@isi.edu). 1993 CALENDAR Feb 1-5 ISO/IEC JTC1/SC6/WG3 and WG6, London Feb 8-12 ISO/IEC JTC1/SC6/WG1 and WG4, London Feb 11-12 PSRG Workshop on Network and Distributed System Security, San Diego, Ca Feb 28-Mar 3 Modeling & Analysis of Telecommunication Systems, Nashville, TN Mar 8-12 INTEROP93, Wasington, D.C. Dan Lynch (dlynch@interop.com) Mar 8-12 OIW, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD Mar 8-12 IEEE802 Plenary, Omni Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD Mar 15-19 Uniform, San Francisco Mar 24-31 CEBIT 93, Hannover, Germany Mar 29 - Apr 2, IETF, Columbus, Ohio Apr 5-19 TCOS WG, Boston (tentative) Apr 14-16 National Net'93, Wash D.C. (net93@educom.edu) Apr 18-23 IFIP WG 6.6 Third International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA (kzm@hls.com) Apr 20-22 ANSI X3S3.3, Orlando, FL May 10-13 4th Joint European Networking COnf., JENC93 Trondheim, Norway May 13-14 RARE Council of Administration, Trondheim May 23-26 ICC'93, Geneva, Switzerland May-Jun PSTV-XIII, University of Liege. Contact: Andre Danthine, Jun 2-4 ANSI X3S3.3, Raleigh, NC Jun 7-11 OIW, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD Jun 15-30 ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21, Yokohama Jun 21-25 USENIX, Cincinnati Jun 30 RARE Technical Committee, Amsterdam Jul 12-16 IETF, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Jul 12-16 IEEE802 Plenary, Sheraton Denver Tech Center,Denver, CO Jul 12-16 TCOS WG, Hawaii (tentative) Aug 1-6 Multimedia '93, Anaheim, CA Aug 17-20 INET '93, San Francisco, (Request@inet93.stanford.edu) Aug 23-27 INTEROP93, San Francisco Dan Lynch (dlynch@interop.com) Sep 13-17 SIGCOMM 93, San Francisco Sep ?? 6th SDL Forum, Darmstadt Ove Faergemand (ove@tfl.dk) Sep 8-9 ANSI X3S3.3, Boulder, CO Sep 13-17 OIW, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD Sep 20-31 ISO/IEC JTC1/SC6, Seoul, Korea. Sep 28-29 September RIPE Technical Days, TBC Sep 30-Oct 2 Paris Oct INTEROP93, Paris, France Oct 12-14 Conference on Network Information Processing, Sofia, Bulgaria; Contact: IFIP-TC6 Oct 18-22 TCOS WG, Atlanta, GA (tentative) Nov 2-4 ANSI X3S3.3, TBD Nov 9-13 IEEE802 Plenary, Crown Sterling Suites, Ft. Lauderdale, FL Nov 15-19 Supercomputing 93, Portland, OR Dec 6-10 OIW, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD 1994 CALENDAR Apr 18-22 INTEROP94, Washington, D.C. Dan Lynch (dlynch@interop.com) Jun 1-3 IFIP WG 6.5 ULPAA, Barcelona, Spain Einar Stefferud (stef@nma.com) Aug 28-Sep 2 IFIP World Computer Congress Hamburg, Germany; Contact: IFIP Sep 12-16 INTEROP94, San Francisco Dan Lynch (dlynch@interop.com) 1995 CALENDAR Sep 18-22 INTEROP95, San Francisco, CA Dan Lynch (dlynch@interop.com) ========================================================================