~ March 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) 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 ARCHITECTURE BOARD IAB MESSAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3 INTERNET RESEARCH REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 6 RESOURCE DISCOVERY AND DIRECTORY SERVICE . . .. . . . page 6 INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7 Internet Projects ANSNET/NSFNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 13 BARRNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 20 BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 21 CONCERT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23 ISI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24 JANET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 26 JVNCNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 27 NEARNET (NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK) . . . page 29 NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . page 30 MERIT/NSFNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 33 NSFNET/INFORMATION SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 35 SDSC (SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER) . . . . . . . . . . page 37 UCL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 37 UDEL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 38 WISCNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 39 CALENDAR OF EVENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 40 INTERNET ARCHITECTURE MESSAGE THE NEW WORLD ORDER The November 1992 IETF meeting adopted the outline of a new organizational structure for the IAB/IETF, to accomodate continued growth and new consituencies. This outline was documented in RFC- 1396 ["The Process for Organization of Internet Standards Working Group (POISED)", S. Crocker, RFC-1396, January 1993]. The Board of Trustees of the Internet Society accepted the revisions in December 1992, and transition to the new plan began. One of the key effects of this change (known colloquially as the "New World Order" or NWO) is to install a nominations process to select new IAB and IESG members. IAB and IESG members will serve 2 year terms, with half of the positions on each board subject to re-selection each year. The Internet Society Board of Trustees will review and ratify the new IAB nominations, and the IAB will review and ratify the new IESG nominations. Following the November IETF meeting, a Nomination Committee was selected by a random drawing from volunteering IETF attendees. Jeff Case served as the chair. Roughly half of the existing members of the IAB and IESG put their positions up for renomination; the other half will continue to serve with a remaining term of one year. At the Thursday evening open plenary session of the IETF meeting in Columbus Ohio, the Nomination Committee reported its results. The "old" IAB was able to caucus in person and by telephone, and approved the new IESG nominations. The ISOC Board of Trustees was able to approve the new IAB members via email. Hence, the NWO is now fully in effect. THE NEW IAB For the next year, the IAB membership will be as follows: Bob Braden (USC/ISI) *Elise Gerich (Merit) Christian Huitema (INRIA) Steve Kent (BBN) Tony Lauck (DEC) Barry Leiner (USRA) *Jun Murai (WIDE) Jon Postel (USC/ISI) *Yakov Rekhter (IBM Research) *John Romkey (ELF) *Dave Sincoskie (Bellcore) *Mike StJohns (ARPA) The names marked with a "*" are the new members. The IAB will choose a chair from among its members. The chair of the IETF, Phill Gross, sits on the IAB as an ex officio member. The IRSG chair may also be ex officio; at present, however, it is filled by Jon Postel, who is a regular member of the IAB. THE NEW IESG The new membership of the IESG is as follows: *Phill Gross (ANS) IETF/IESG chair *Brewster Kahle (WAIS Inc.) Applications Erik Huizer (SURFnet) Applications *David Crocker (SGI) Service Applications *Allison Mankin (NRL) Transport *Marshall Rose (Consultant) Network Management Robert Hinden (Sun Microsystems) Routing *Stev Knowles (FTP Software) Internet David Piscitello (Bellcore) Internet Joyce Reynolds (USC/ISI) User Services *Scott Bradner (Harvard) Operational Requirements Bernhard Stockman (SUNET/NORDUnet/EBONE NOC) Operational Requirements Stephen Crocker (TIS) Security *Lyman Chapin (BBN) Standards Management * = new or reconfirmed members (Note: Prior to the Nominating Committee's deliberations, the IESG decided to divide the Transport Services Area into the Service Applications and Transport Areas. Service Applications will include protocols used by other applications, and not directly by users. Examples include DNS and NTP.) On behalf of the IAB, the IESG, and the Internet community, we want to express some well deserved thanks and appreciation to the IAB and IESG members who decided not to continue: Phil Almquist, Dave Borman, James (Chuck) Davin, and Russ Hobby of the IESG, and Hans-Werner Braun, Vint Cerf, Lyman Chapin, and Dan Lynch of the IAB. Serving on the IAB and IESG is generally a volunteer job, and as these folks know all too well, it requires a serious investment of time. They have served us all well and will be missed. They deserve our thanks. IAB MEETING The IAB held an open meeting at the IETF meeting in Columbus, OH, on Tuesday evening March 30, 1993. A single topic was discussed: the proposals for liaison between the Internet Society/IETF standards process and the International Standards Organization (ISO). The pros and cons of these proposals were frankly and thoroughly discussed by the IAB and some 30 attendees. No decisions were made. Cerf, President of ISOC, will publish pertinent documentation as RFCs. Bob Braden, IAB Executive Director Phill Gross, IESG/IETF Chair INTERNET RESEARCH REPORTS ------------------------- RESOURCE DISCOVERY AND DIRECTORY SERVICE ---------------------------------------- The Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service has reformed as a small group of researchers addressing a focused set of problems. We have written a paper about our current directions, which is now available by anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.colorado.edu, in the file pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/PostScript/RD.ResearchProblems.ps.Z (compressed PostScript) or in the file pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/ASCII/RD.ResearchProblems.txt.Z (compressed ASCII). Here is the title/abstract: C. M. Bowman, P. B. Danzig and M. F. Schwartz. Research Problems for Scalable Internet Resource Discovery. Technical Report CU-CS-643-93, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, March 1993. Abstract: Over the past several years, a number of information discovery and access tools have been introduced in the Internet, including Archie, Gopher, Netfind, and WAIS. These tools have become quite popular, and are helping to redefine how people think about wide area network applications. Yet, they are not well suited to supporting the future information infrastructure, which will be characterized by enormous data volume, rapid growth in the user base, and burgeoning data diversity. In this paper we indicate trends in these three dimensions, and survey problems these trends will create for current approaches. We then suggest several promising directions of future resource discovery research, along with some initial results from projects carried out by members of the Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service. Mike Schwartz@latour.cs.colorado.edu. INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS ---------------------------- 1. By the time the IMR is distributed, the 26th meeting of the IETF will have concluded. The meeting was held March 29 - April 2 in Columbus, Ohio, hosted by OARNet and The Ohio State University. The next meeting of the IETF will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and is being co-hosted by SURFnet and RARE. The meeting will run from July 12-16, 1993. This will be the first time an IETF meeting has been held outside of North America. The attendee fee for the Amsterdam IETF meeting will be $200. Further details will be distributed as they become available. 2. The IESG approved or recommended the following three actions during the month of March, 1993: o IEEE 802.4 Token Bus MIB to Historic status o Path MTU Discovery as a Draft Standard. o IESG Advice from Experience with Path MTU Discovery as an Informational document. 3. The IESG issued 13 Last Calls to the IETF during the month of March, 1993: o Multiprotocol Interconnect over ATM Adaptation Layer 5 o Protocol Operations for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Introduction to version 2 of the Internet-standard Network Management Framework o Transport Mappings for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Structure of Management Information for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Coexistence between version 1 and version 2 of the Network Management Framework o Textual Conventions for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Manager to Manager Management Information Base o Management Information Base for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Conformance Statements for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Party MIB for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Security Protocols for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) o Administrative Model for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) 4. The following Working Group was created: Source Demand Routing (sdr) Additionally, three Working Groups concluded during the month: Internet Mail Extensions (smtpext) SNMP over a Multi-protocol Internet (mpsnmp) TCP Client Identity Protocol (ident) 5. Seventy-five (75) Internet Draft actions were taken during the month of March, 1993: (Revised draft (o), New Draft (+) ) WG I-D Title ------ -------------------------------------------------- (pppext) o Requirements for an Internet Standard Point-to-Point Protocol (rreq) o Requirements for IP Routers Volume 1: Introduction (cat) o Generic Security Service API : C-bindings (idpr) o Definitions of Managed Objects for the Inter-Domain Policy Routing Protocol (Version 1) (tnfs) o A Specification of Trusted NFS (TNFS) Protocol Extensions (mospf) o Multicast Extensions to OSPF (isis) o Integrated IS-IS Management Information Base (x400ops) o Routing coordination for X.400 MHS services within a multi protocol / multi network environment Table Format V3 for static routing (x400ops) o Operational Requirements for X.400 Management Domains in the GO-MHS Community (none) o IDRP for IP (atm) o Multiprotocol Interconnect over ATM Adaptation Layer 5 (x400ops) o X.400 use of extended character sets (mimemhs) o Mapping between X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies (snmpv2) o Protocol Operations for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (snmpv2) o Transport Mappings for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (snmpv2) o Coexistence between version 1 and version 2 of the Network Management Framework (snmpv2) o Introduction to version 2 of the Internet-standard Network Management Framework (snmpv2) o Textual Conventions for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (snmpv2) o Management Information Base for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (snmpv2) o Structure of Management Information for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (snmpv2) o Manager to Manager Management Information Base (none) o Core Based Trees (CBT) An Architecture for Scalable Inter-Domain Multicast Routing (none) o TCP/IP: Internet Version 7 (bgp) o BGP4/IDRP for IP---OSPF Interaction (none) o Source Demand Routing: Packet Format and Forwarding Specification (Version 1) (ids) o A Survey of Advanced Usages of X.500 (none) o Recommendations for Mail Based Servers (noop) o Essential Tools for the OSI Internet (ospf) o OSPF Version 2 (x400ops) o Postmaster Convention for X.400 Operations (pem) o MIME-PEM Interaction (snmpv2) o Conformance Statements for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (pppext) o Compressing IPX Headers Over WAN Media (CIPX) (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) (snmpsec) o Administrative Model for version 2 of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv2) (pppext) o PPP LCP Extensions (iplpdn) o Multiprotocol Interconnect over Frame Relay Networks (x400ops) o Using the Internet DNS to maintain X.400 MHS Routing Informations (none) o RAP: Internet Route Access Protocol (822ext) o Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies (atm) + Partial Address Resolution in ATM Networks (hubmib) o Definitions of Managed Objects for IEEE 802.3 Medium Attachment Units (MAUs) (none) + Interconnection of APPN Instances via TCP/IP (fddimib) o FDDI Management Information Base (x400ops) + Table distribution (pppext) + PPP over Frame Relay (pppext) + PPP over SONET (pppext) + PPP over X.25 (pppext) + PPP over ISDN (none) + Definition of Managed Objects for the IP for IDRP (cipso) + COMMON IP SECURITY OPTION (none) + IDRP Family Document Tree (avt) + Packetization of H.261 video streams (sip) + SIP-RIP (svrloc) + Resource Location Protocol (none) + TAP: Towards an Addressing Plan for IPv7 (pip) + On the Assignment of Provider Rooted Addresses (ipidrp) + IDRP for SIP (atm) + IP over ATM : architecture, address translation, and call control (822ext) + MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part Two: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text (iiir) + Resource Transponders (dns) + DNS Support for IDPR (822ext) + The text/enriched MIME Content-type (none) + Inter-domain Routing Policy Description and Sharing (noop) + Essential Tools for the OSI Internet (ospf) + The OSPF External Attributes LSA (iplpdn) + Management Information Base for Frame Relay DTEs (atm) + NBMA Address Resolution Protocol (NBMA ARP) (bgpdepl) + Notes of BGP-4/CIDR Coordination Meeting of 11 March 93 (nir) + A Status Report on Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups (none) + Randomness Requirements for Security (iiir) + A Vision of an Integrated Internet Information Service (iesg) + Applicability Statement for the Implementation of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) (bgpdepl) + Aggregation Support in the NSFNET Policy Routing Database 6. Thirteen (13) RFC's were published during the month of March, 1993. RFC St WG Title ------- -- -------- ----------------------------------------- RFC1400 I (none) Transition and Modernization of the Internet Registration Service RFC1410 S (iab) IAB OFFICIAL PROTOCOL STANDARDS RFC1418 PS (mpsnmp) SNMP over OSI RFC1419 PS (mpsnmp) SNMP over AppleTalk RFC1420 PS (mpsnmp) SNMP over IPX RFC1432 I (none) Recent Internet Books RFC1433 E (iplpdn) Directed ARP RFC1434 I (none) Data Link Switching: Switch-to-Switch Protocol RFC1435 I (iesg) IESG Advice from Experience with Path MTU Discovery RFC1436 I (none) The Internet Gopher Protocol(a distributed document search and retrieval protocol) RFC1437 I (822ext) The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium RFC1438 I (none) Internet Engineering Task Force Statements Of Boredom(SOBs) RFC1439 I (none) The Uniqueness of Unique Identifiers St(atus): ( S) Internet Standard (PS) Proposed Standard (DS) Draft Standard ( E) Experimental ( I) Informational Steve Coya (scoya@cnri.reston.va.us) INTERNET PROJECTS ----------------- ANSNET/NSFNET BACKBONE ENGINEERING ---------------------------------- Network Status Summary ====================== Following a last minute problem report during AIX 3.2 testing, the deployment of the AIX 3.2 operating system on the T3 routers is now tentatively scheduled to begin on April 16, 1993. The first release of AIX 3.2 will increase the on-card forwarding table capacity to support 12,000 destinations, and the subsequent release of AIX 3.2 software scheduled for May-June will increase the forwarding table capacity to support 25,000 destinations, with no hardware changes required. ANS is now testing BGP4 in Gated and we have invited router vendors to join us in interoperability testing. Vendors may establish TCP sessions to a BGP4 ANSnet router over the network. We will also support vendors that want to bring equipment to the private ANS wide area test network. The Gated plan is described in more detail below. No new rcp_routed routing software changes were administered on the ANSnet during the month of March. Development of the new higher performance RS960 T3 card proceeded in March. This adapter (FDDI/T3) supports full HSSI bandwidth, and will route IP datagrams at speeds in excess of 40KPPS. Backbone Traffic and Routing Statistics ======================================= The total inbound packet count for the network (measured using SNMP interface counters) was 30,956,493,834 on T3 ENSS interfaces, up 14.7% from February. The total packet count into the network (including all ENSS serial interfaces was 34,175,829,718. As of March 31, the number of networks configured in the Merit Policy Routing Database was 10493 for the T3 backbone. Of these, 2194 were never announced to the T3 backbone (e.g. silent nets). The maximum number of networks announced to the T3 backbone during the month (from samples collected every 15 minutes) was 7750, up 9.5% from February. Average announced networks on 3/31 were 7690. AIX 3.2 Migration Plan Status ============================= The T3 backbone software upgrade to support the AIX 3.2 operating system was originally scheduled to be begin on April 2nd, at 23:00 local time. However a software problem was identified and the deployment has been delayed until April 17. The deployment is scheduled to proceed as originally planned on April 17 instead of April 2nd. A revised postscript file illustrating the phased deployment at each POP CNSS and adjacent ENSS is located on ftp.ans.net in /pub/info/aix32dpmap.ps and may be summarized as follows: Phase I (April 17) - Washington D.C. Phase II (April 17) - Seattle/Denver, San Francisco/Los Angeles Phase III (April 24) - Greensboro/Atlanta, Houston/St. Louis Phase IV (May 1) - Hartford/New York City, Cleveland/Chicago Growth in Destination Networks ============================== As described in the February '93 engineering report, the interface forwarding tables on the ANSnet routers are currently configured to support 10K destinations. In the near term, microcode changes will be deployed with the first AIX 3.2 build to support improved address compression in the forwarding tables which will support 12K destinations. A subsequent AIX 3.2 software build will be released in the May-June timeframe that will support 25,000 destinations in the on-card forwarding tables. Gated, BGP4 and CIDR Progress ============================= Dennis Ferguson is now testing BGP4 support in Gated. ANS has extended invitations to router vendors to test BGP4 interoperability with the Gated implementation. A router running this software is accessible on the public network and vendors may establish TCP sessions to this machine. ANS will also support vendors that wish to bring their BGP4 compatible equipment to test on our wide area test network. BGP4 within Gated will support CIDR aggregation. The kernel, microcode and routing daemon support for CIDR is expected to reduce the rate of growth in the number of on-card routes. ANSnet will configure to receive and redistribute aggregated routes to other networks that support BGP4. ANSnet will also perform proxy aggregation for networks that are not running BGP4. The Gated that is being developed for ANSnet is intended to operate as a compatible replacement for rcp_routed. Initially it will support the ANSnet/NSFnet IGP (called SLSP, or "simple link state protocol", in the implementation), BGP versions 2, 3 and 4 and EGP version 2. We will also include RIP versions 1 and 2 in the build in case this is useful at customer sites, and could include OSPF as well for the same purpose if the routers could be made to support local net multicasting. Gated provides complete on-the-fly reconfigurability. That is, new configuration files with arbitrary changes may be installed, and Gated can be signaled to re-read them. Gated will then adjust its running state to match the new configuration with no interruption of already-established but unchanged routing sessions. This should allow network reconfiguration to be done with little or no interruption of network service. The Gated implementation of SLSP provides compatibility with the rcp_routed IGP over point-to-point links and adds support for broadcast subnets. Gated's BGP, in addition to handling more modern versions of the protocol than rcp_routed, has a number of features and enhancements including interoperability with IBGP used by rcp_routed. A different algorithm for resolving immediate next hops is used, allowing the one-gateway-per-AS restriction to be relaxed. The algorithm for importing external routes has also changed. While rcp_routed distributes all routes it learns from an external neighbor to all other internal neighbors (even if those routes won't be used because a better preference route exists), Gated only distributes external routes internally if they are equally or more preferred than any existing route to the same destination. This reduces the amount of state the routers maintain substantially in the normal case, at the expense of a longer transient when a first preference route is withdrawn. The Gated BGP supports timers on both the incoming and outgoing announcements. Incoming timers constrain the rate at which changes to a neighbor's advertisements are believed and propagated into the system. For example, setting the incoming timer to 60 seconds means that only one change for a particular route would be propagated every minute. This is meant to be used mostly as an emergency means of constraining the load from announcements by neighbors who have gone unstable. The outgoing timer delays the propagation of changes out to neighbors. For example, setting the outgoing timer to 10 seconds on an external peer would delay the advertisement of internal changes for 10 seconds. This is meant to be used to cover up internal transients which will occur when a primary route is withdrawn but the secondary route to the same destination has not yet been advertised internally. If the withdrawal-insertion occurs within the 10 second interval the external neighbor will only see a change, not an outage. Gated policy is substantially more flexible than rcp_routed's. We can advertise a true default route to neighbors via BGP. While rcp_routed can only apply outgoing policy based on neighbor AS, Gated can in addition apply policy by network, full AS path or any combination. Gated can apply policy to incoming IBGP, for example allowing us to omit some networks from the forwarding tables on some ENSS's. Aggregation policy can be configured. With BGP 4 we can allow neighbors to advertise subnet routes to an ENSS to get the next hop router right, but not propagate those routes into internal routing. We will be fully free to configure multiple gateways to the same AS, and/or to use external metrics received on BGP connections to choose the appropriate exit for destinations within a neighbor AS. We will be able to import and propagate a customer's subnets when they have multiple sites using subnets of the same network number connected to our backbone. Gated can in principle use RIP, or static routing, or even OSPF to obtain customer routing, giving us additional flexibility with end-user customer configuration. While Gated currently lacks the ability to associate an external AS with such routes to allow our current policy methods to operate, the additional policy language required to do this has been designed and is scheduled for implementation. Associated with gated is a program ("gdc") which provides an operational interface for starting and stopping the daemon, signal delivery and other functions. This is a better way to manipulate Gated from shell scripts and the like since error detection is more reliable. Rcp_routed Routing Software Changes =================================== There were no new changes to the rcp_routed software on the T3 network during March. There are some changes planned for April including support for the planned migration from AIX 3.1 to AIX 3.2 software including multipath forwarding, and generation of third party routes. Release notes for rcp_routed are available for anonymous ftp in: ftp.ans.net:/pub/info/t3-rcp_routed/Release-Notes Routing Stability Measured on the T3 Network ============================================ Internal routing stability measurements are made by monitoring short term disconnect times (disconnects of five minutes duration or less). During February the overall stability approached 99% (no internal disconnects in any part of the network 99% of the time) and all individual nodes reported 99.8% stability or better. Overall stability in March was down to 97.5% or 99.1% excluding instability during the configuration windows. E206 (CERN - Geneva, Switzerland) was the most unstable node with recurring circuit problems. E206 saw 1 hour and 29 minutes of instability outside of the configuration window. E205 and C51 were used as test sites for AIX 3.2 deployment before becoming full production nodes. These saw about 1 hour each of instability outside of the configuration windows. The remaining 84 nodes reported less than 21 minutes of instability (99.96% stability or better) excluding the configuration windows with 61 reporting better than 99.99% stability (under 4:48). When the configuration window is included, there was over 18 hours of instability (where any one node was disconnected). Several new nodes were brought on line this month. This tends to lengthen configuration runs. Some circuit testing at E206 was performed during the configuration window. There were some router card failures which resulted in card replacements during the configuration window. A few nodes were upgraded to AIX 3.2. Some testing was done on AIX 3.2 at new installations prior to going into full production. Three production nodes and one new installation reported 2 hours to 3:43 of instability (99.75-99.5% stability). 18 nodes reported 1-2 hours of instability. The remaining 68 nodes reported less than 1 hour of instability during the configuration runs (99.86% stable or better). Reducing the impact of the configuration runs is a near term goal. External route flaps were measured by collecting IBGP updates with the unreachable attribute at an internal router between Feb 28 19:05:14 UTC and Mar 31 20:38:21 UTC. During this period 200,041 updates were received from 615 distinct AS paths. These updates contained 818,812 network numbers (about 4 networks per update on average). The were 4,048 distinct network numbers (an average of 202 unreachables per flapping network number). The most unstable network flapped 4,786 times (once every 9.3 minutes on average over the course of one month). On average 269 updates with unreachables were received per hour, withdrawing an average of about 1,100 route per hour. There were 17% fewer updates, and 38% more routes withdrawn than in February. The 60% increase in the number of routes per update may indicate less flapping by end systems, and more flapping by transit systems compared with the February results. SNMP Public Community Views =========================== ANS has always provided a read-only SNMP community on ENSS and selected CNSS routers to ANS customers and NSFNET regional techs. This SNMP access provides a useful window into technical aspects of ANSNet, allows customers to better manage their external connectivity and is an invaluable aid when debugging connectivity problems. Until recently we permitted read-only access to the full set of MIBs available on each router. For security and performance reasons we are now restricting snmp lookups to the following MIB- II objects: System, interfaces, at, ipForwarding, ipDefaultTTL, ipInReceives, ipInHdrErrors, ipInAddrErrors, ipForwDatagrams, ipInUnknownProtos, ipInDiscards, ipInDelivers, ipOutRequests, ipOutDiscards, ipOutNoRoutes, ipReasmTimeout, ipReasmReqds, ipReasmOKs, ipReasmFails, ipFragOKs, ipFragFails, ipFragCreates, ipAddrTable, ipNetToMediaTable, ipRoutingDiscards, icmp, tcp, udp, egp, transmission, snmp, enterprises.25 As far as we have been able to tell, this restriction should not affect any SNMP polling currently being done on the network. T3 Network Performance for Source Route Optioned Packets ======================================================== Some tests involving switching of loose source record route (LSRR) optioned packets were performed on the T3 network to verify network performance in the presence of Mbone traffic (thanks to PSC). Multiple streams of 7.8Mb/s each were sustained between PSC and Chicago for a bi-directional total of 23.5Mb/s of LSRR packet load without any packet drops or other problems. New ANSnet ENSS Nodes Activated in March ======================================== ENSS Customer Access Date Active ---- -------- ------ ----------- E223 Weyerhauser 56K 03/09 E221 RSNA 56K 03/12 E228 N.U.G. 56K 03/12 E225 PSR Technique 56K 03/23 E226 Mead Data T1 03/23 E230 Digital Exp. T1 03/29 E227 Metro T1 03/31 New CNSS Router Installed in Cleveland ====================================== CNSS44 was installed in the Cleveland POP on 3/6/93. Internet Talk Radio Distribution ================================ ANS CO+RE is providing an Internet Talk Radio secondary server. This is distributed via a modified anonymous ftp server for the time being. As usage data becomes available we may modify the distribution method. Notable Outages in March '93 ============================ ENSS206 (CERN) suffered extended circuit outages on 3/15, 3/25, 3/29. CNSS43 (Cleveland) suffered an extended outage due to a hardware failure on 3/12. Nodes affected included E158, E167, E190, E197, E212, E228, E168. The Greensboro POP suffered a power failure on 3/20 causing an outage to E159, E151, E153. Jordan Becker, ANS (becker@ans.net) BARRNET (BAY AREA REGIONAL RESEARCH NETWORK) -------------------------------------------- Membership Update Date: 3/31/93 Member Organizations: 163 New Members, March: Asante, Connect, Wetware, Kaiser InfoWorld, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Upgrades, March: Lexical: 56K -> T1 Events On March 15-16 in San Francisco, BARRNet hosted the Merit/NSFNET Networking Seminars, Making Your Internet Connection Count: Technology, Tools & Resources. The seminar was attended by about 150 participants, many of whom were quite sophisticated in their knowledge of the Internet. Sponsored by Merit, the seminars featured presentations by Bill Yundt, Director of BARRNet; Ellen Hoffman, Manager, Network Information Services, Merit; George Brett (WAIS), Alan Emtage (Archie), and Mark McCahill (Gopher); Tom Grundner, President of the National Telecomputing Network (Cleveland Freenet), Perry Samson, University of Michigan Weather Underground; Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information; and other distinguished speakers. BARRNet provided a 56K Internet connection to which six Macintosh CXs, courtesy of Apple Computer, were connected for demos and Internet connectivity throughout the conference. Publications BARRNet has resumed publication of its newsletter, The BARRNetter, distributed quarterly to its members. The BARRNetter covers the latest Internet news, noteworthy current events, graphics, maps, and BARRNet news. BARRNet will soon begin publishing an electronic newsletter, "Heard on the Net" (HOTN), to be distributed via email to BARRNet's membership. By agreement with Newsbytes News Network, HOTN will carry selected Newsbytes articles relevant to the Internet community, as well as an eclectic selection of news, resources, reviews, interviews, opinions, humor, and other items of interest to BARRNet's membership. The first issue of BARRTech Notes, technical papers of interest to the technical personnel of BARRNet's membership organizations will also be coming out, soon. The first issue will address NTP (Network Time Protocol). BARRNet info@barrnet.net Pine Hall, Rm 115 Phone: 415-725-1790 Stanford University Fax: 415-723-0010 Stanford, CA 94305-4122 John Hoag BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC. ---------------------------- Scaleability Work continued on enhancements to the flow-level network simulator. Some code redesign was done to make the software more modular and to better support planned features. The delay model has been completed. Work is currently in progress on statistics collection and display. A general statistics output file format is being defined to minimize the size of collected data files, which may be quite large for long-running simulations. Also, a candidate set of algorithm investigations has been proposed, and recommendations determined for the next phase of algorithm research. InterDomain Policy Routing (IDPR) We have been making the final tests of the IDPR gated software in preparation for the Internet pilot demonstration. The machines that will act as policy gateways for the transit domains NSFnet, NSInet, and TWBnet will be shipped out in early April. At the conclusion of the pilot, we will generate an informational RFC describing the results. We are also in the process of updating the configuration document for IDPR and expect to have a new draft by the end of May. Real-time Multicast Communications and Applications We began investigating hooking up ISI's MMCC conferencing application as a source and destination that can be accessed via BBN's videoserver. We are currently awaiting a new version of this application which will provide a better interface for this work. We began work on extending the XIO protocol to support multicast video and multi-resolution video. The XIO protocol is the protocol used by a software switch at the video server to communicate with a workstation running a video application. Just as an analog hardware switch sets up analog communications between a source and destination, the software switch, using the XIO protocol sets up digital communications between a source and a destination. The video server will support transmission of video to a multicast address, allowing multiple workstations to simultaneously view the same video. The video server will also support transmission of multi-resolution video, enabling workstations to receive video at a bandwidth supported by the network connections between the workstation and the server. With this capability, two workstations, one on the end of a high bandwidth line and the other at the end of a low bandwidth line, will be able to simultaneously receive the same video at two different resolutions. Paul Milazzo participated in a panel session entitled "Multimedia Internetworks" at InterOp '93 in Washington. He gave a talk entitled "Video over IP Internetworks." Paul also attended the IETF meetings in Columbus late in the month and participated in the Audio/Video Transport (AVT) working group meetings. We are using an earlier version of the AVT protocol in the video server; we are keeping abreast of developments on the protocol and updating our implementation as needed. On the protocol and communications front, our work this month was concentrated on extending the design of the four service concepts (anycasting, multi-level flows, shared streams, and resource coordination objects). A number of areas were found where the services could be made more general. Considerable effort was spent to identify ways of making this work more widely available, and improving integration with other internet research. ANYCASTING -- The anycasting service has been implemented and is operational. It is compatible with existing routers and routing protocols, though efficient address-space utilization requires routers to support mask-based routing protocols such as OSPF. The current implementation works on SunOS and uses a simple extension of the BSD networking code. The implementation is easily portable to other BSD-based systems, and the technique should be straightforward to implement on other platforms. MULTI-LEVEL FLOWS -- We are planning to augment the IP multicast routing implementation, mrouted, to support multi-level flows. This will include upward-compatible extensions to IGMP to identify which sub-flows the receiver desires. A design goal is to support interoperation with unmodified IP multicast routers, though optimal delivery of sub-flows may not occur when unmodified routers are involved. SHARED STREAMS -- This service is an extension of resource reservation mechanisms such as Fair Share and RSVP. It permits multiple flows to request to share a single resource reservation, which allows distributed applications to make use of statistical multiplexing. We are starting an implementation of shared streams based on the Fair Share code, and are planning to use resource coordination objects (see below) to describe the flows. RESOURCE COORDINATION OBJECTS -- RCOs are a general technique for distributed applications to communicate information about aggregates of network-related resources among hosts and network nodes. They can be used to support both session-layer services and network-layer services, and can be used to coordinate auxiliary information about flows with network routing. There are a wide variety of potential uses for RCOs, including distributed session management, network resource reservation, multicast access control, and intelligent resource preemption. We have just started work on designing a basic infrastructure for RCOs, including a variety of propagation paradigms. Karen Seo CONCERT ------- Since the beginning of the year, CONCERT has connected eight new sites, including seven commercial customers and one high school. CONCERT has released its first issue of The DATAGRAM, a quarterly newsletter designed to provide a forum for the CONCERT Data Network staff to inform CONCERT network users about Internet issues. The newsletter is available via our Gopher server and via anonymous ftp from ftp.concert.net under concert/doc/newsletter. Several CONCERT staff members attended the recent IETF in Columbus. by Tom Sandoski ISI --- GIGABIT NETWORKING Infrastructure Jon Postel, Bob Braden, Eve Schooler, Joyce Reynolds, Steve Casner and Eve Schooler attended the IETF meetings in Columbus Ohio, March 29-April 2. Nine RFCs were published this month. RFC 1400: Williamson, S., "Transition and Modernization of the Internet Registration Service", Network Solutions, Inc., March 1993. RFC 1410: Postel, J., "IAB Official Protocol Standards", Editor, Internet Architecture Board, March 1993. RFC 1432: Quarterman, J., "Recent Internet Books", MIDS, March 1993. RFC 1433: Garrett, J., (AT&T Bell Labs), J. Hagan, (Univ. Penn) J. Wong (AT&T Bell Labs), "Directed ARP", March 1933. RFC 1434: Dixon, R., and D. Kushi, "Data Link Switching: Switch-to-Switch Protocol", IBM, March 1993. RFC 1435: Knowles, S., "IESG Advice from Experience with Path MTU Discovery", Ftp Software, March 1993. RFC 1436: Anklesaria, F., M. McCahill, P. Lindner, D. Johnson, D. Torrey, B. Alberti, "The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol) RFC 1437: Borenstein, N., (Bellcore), M. Linimon, Lonesome Dove Computing Services, "The Extension of MIME Content- Types to a New Medium", April 1993. RFC 1438: Chapin, L., (BBN), and C. Huietema, (INRIA) "Internet Engineering Task Force Statements of Boredom (SOBs)", April 1, 1993. Ann Westine Cooper (Cooper@ISI.EDU) MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING At the Columbus IETF meeting, we chaired two teleconferencing- related groups. The Audio/Video Transport Working Group is nearing completion in the specification of an experimental real-time transport protocol. A second group on Conferencing Control met as a BOF to discuss the requirements of a session protocol for multiway collaborations, and particularly to focus on a suitable scope for this problem to establish a charter and a working group. The intent is to specify a protocol to support loose- and tight- control conference styles. As an example of how such a session protocol might interact with the already popular tools such as PARC's nv and LBL's vat, we demonstrated at the IETF an X-based version of the MMCC conference control tool. MMCC takes a tightly-controlled approach to session management in that it explicitly shares full session-related information among all the participants. In the demonstration, we used MMCC to invite a specific set of participants (vs having a wide-open session), to distribute multicast addresses and a shared encryption key among those participants, and to initiate as well as tear down sessions comprised of some selection of underlying tools. Since MMCC stays "in the loop" after session initiation, we expect it in the future to provide a channel for negotiation of quality of service and configuration parameters as they may change during the session. We intend soon to release MMCC for more widespread use. The Columbus IETF marked the fourth live multicast of audio and video. A memo on "How to do an IETF A/V multicast" was written to help the organizers of the Columbus and future IETFs to set up the necessary equipment. Also, just before the meeting, Van Jacobson implemented IP encapsulation for multicast tunnels; with Steve Deering, we worked to test and distribute that code as widely as possible since it makes a big performance improvement. The paper, "The Impact of Scaling on a Multimedia Connection Architecture", was completed this month, and will appear in the Journal of Multimedia Systems. A shorter version appeared in the 3rd International Workshop on Networking and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, San Diego, CA (Nov 1992). Steve Casner, Eve Schooler, (casner@isi.edu, schooler@isi.edu) JANET ----- March has been a relatively quiet month in terms of changes to JANET. This has been due mainly to delays in receiving router equipment necessary to carry out the upgrades described in the last monthly report. It would seem that demand exceeds supply for cisco AGS+/4 components, and particular difficulty has been experienced in getting the HSSI interfaces necessary to implement the 34 Mbit/s backbone for SuperJANET. Delivery dates have been missed although revised dates suggest that it will be possible to bring this backbone up in mid April. On 23-25 March the JANET community had its annual Networkshop conference at the University of Birmingham. Traditionally this is a time when new ideas for the next year are discussed. One of the topics debated this year was whether there should be a migration of the JANET network from an X.25 base to an IP base. (Currently the network is based on X.25, with IP encapsulated on top of this. However, the strong growth in use of IP has meant that over 60% of the traffic on the network is in fact encapsulated IP.) Operationally it makes sense to move to less use of IP encapsulated over X.25 in the backbone, but the main question was whether some sites would prefer to use only IP in connecting to JANET, and forsake X.25. The consensus was that this should happen relatively quickly, to support the rapid growth in use of IP-based applications at sites, although there will still be a significant need to support X.25-based applications for some time at many sites. We are therefore now studying the best means of satisfying this demand -- at present the most feasible solution seems to be to migrate JANET to an IP network and to run a X.25 network on top of this by encapsulation. The X.25 network would be relatively large at the outset but, if the requirements expressed by site representatives at Networkshop turn out to be accurate, this should drop off fairly rapidly. The total IP traffic switched across JANET in March was approximately 1150 Gigabyte. Of this approximately 210 Gigabyte passed through the UK/US Fat-pipe, and approximately 115 Gigabyte to and from EBONE. The number of hosts attached can be measured, to first order, by the size of the ac.uk domain. As of end March it contained 54338 distinct hosts in 296 subdomains. (This was an increase of 3510 hosts and represents approximately 90% of the uk domain.) Bob Day (R.Day@jnt.ac.uk) JVNCNET ------- JvNCnet-Global Enterprise Services, Inc. B6 von Neumann Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 1-800-35-TIGER I. New Information New on-line members (fully operational March 1993) C.P. Test, Kearney, NJ Canon USA, Lake Success, NY Computer Era Corp., New York, NY Connecticut Student Loan Foundation, Rocky Hill, CT Current Science, Philadelphia, PA Data Storage Technologies, Ridgewood,NJ Engineering Dynamics, Inc., Kenner, LA J.Grandits, Red Bank, NJ Hobart Press, Summit, NJ Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., Plainsboro, NJ Matrix International, New Haven, CT Mikros Systems, Princeton, NJ Mild Real Estate, Norristown, PA N. Nored, San Marcos, TX Omnee Systems & Software Corp., Stratford,CT Raritan Bay Medical Center, Perth Amboy, NJ Stark Information Specialists, North Brunswick, NJ Tangent Computing Ltd., Sibuya-Ku, Tokyo, JAPAN Voicenet, Ivyland, PA II. Symposia Series All seminars are open to the public. To place your name on the symposia mailing list, please send email to hammer@jvnc.net. The April 14-15 Local and Wide Area Network seminars have been postponed. The next symposia are: Location for each: Princeton Marriott Forrestal Village, 201 Village Blvd., Plainsboro, NJ Date: May 26, 1993 Title: Network Management and Operations Audience: Network managers and system administrators Topics to include explanation of the monitoring process, troubleshooting capabilities, and functions associated with network operations management and how to establish a networkoperations center at your site. Date: June 29, 1993 Title: System Administration on the Internet Audience: Network managers and systems administrators Topics: Domain name service (DMS), sendMail, news Explicit details and implementation guidelines for proper set up a new system for using the Internet and to streamline a current system in these three above-named important areas will be provided. Instructors: sendMAIL: Neil Rickert, Northern Illinois University Network news: Richard Salz, Open Software Foundation Domain name services: Vikas Aggarwal, GES, Inc. For further details or to register, please send email to hammer@jvnc.net or call Rochelle Hammer at 609-258-2409. III. February 19, 1993 Internet Resources and Applications Symposium About 80 people attended the seminar at the Princeton Marriott Forrestal Village to learn more about the Internet and its abundant holdings. They remarked that the sessions increased their understanding and knowledge of the network and will allow them to make fuller use of what it offers. The following speakers covered these subjects: Thomas Devlin, Montclair State College - The value of Internet- working and thoughts on what's in store for the future Dan Oberst, CIT Princeton University - Gopher, WWW, WAIS, and archie "tools" with demonstration. Steve Burdick, Merit Inc. - "Navigating Internet: An Information Service Cruise" John Garrett, CNRI - Knowbot applications for database searches David Rodgers, American Mathematical Society - e-MATH application, communications and publishing for professionals and researchers in the mathematical sciences. Sue Brizuela, Scientific and Technical Information Network - textual and numeric databases designed for most of the scientific disciplines including life sciences, material science, and health safety. Jim Quigley, Dialog - wide ranging on-line information for accountants, business executives, consumers, financial people, veterinarians, pharmacologists, etc. Martin Loveless and Linda Gleason Burns, Mead Data Central - Lexis and Nexis David Magier, Area Studies, Columbia University - Electronic humanities scholarship NEARNET (NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK) --------------------------------------------------- NEARnet Membership ------------------ As of March 30, 1993, NEARnet has grown to a total of 211 member organizations. Internet Talk Radio available from NEARnet ------------------------------------------ Internet Talk Radio, a "radio" program in the style of NPR's "All Things Considered" is being distributed over the Internet. The "show" is currently composed of a collection of digitized audio files. NEARnet has agreed to offer a secondary distribution server for Internet Talk Radio as an experimental service to its members. The current files are located on radio.near.net in the talk-radio directory. For additional information, retrieve the file internet-talk- radio.txt from the docs directory on nic.near.net. Please direct any questions/comments about Internet Talk Radio, program content, file formats, usage, etc. to: info@radio.com. Conference and Meeting Participation ------------------------------------ On March 5, John Curran spoke at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which was hosting a public policy seminar on "Building Information Infrastructure in Massachusetts." John discussed the upcoming NSF backbone service solication and possible implication for network infrastructure in Massachusetts. Dan Long participated in the Boston Computer Society's "K-12 schools and the Internet" Special Interest Group on March 9. NEARnet participated in Interop 93, which was held in Washington, DC, March 10-12th. NEARnet staff demonstrated the network operations tools used to monitor and track NEARnet performance. The staff also demonstrated video-over-ip services to the NEARnet NOC. John Curran participated in the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Boston Chapter meeting at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. on March 18. Following the SLA meeting, on March 24, John also participated in the technical services section of the Massachusetts Library Association's program on the Internet. During the week of March 29, several NEARnet staff participated in technical and user services working groups at the IETF in Columbus, Ohio. NEARnet This Month ------------------ The February/March 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 NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC. ---------------------------------------- Announcement -- Transition from NNSC to the New InterNIC Team ============================================================== On April 1, 1993, the NSF Network Service Center (NNSC) began to phase out its services following the final award of the long- awaited "Network Information Services Manager(s) for NSFNET and the NREN". The services formerly provided by the NNSC are being transferred to a new team made up of three separate organizations, collectively known as the InterNIC (the Internet Network Information Center). * Network Solutions (NSI), has provided registration for the NSFNET since January 1992, and continues to perform all REGISTRATION SERVICES on host RS.InterNIC.NET. * AT&T will provide expanded DIRECTORY AND DATABASE SERVICES on host DS.InterNIC.NET . * General Atomics, which now operates CERFnet and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, provides a Reference Desk and general INFORMATION SERVICES on host IS.InterNIC.NET . This award expands the scope of the services which have previously been supplied by several organizations, including the NSF Network Service Center (NNSC). The NNSC is assisting the combined Network Information Services Managers in this transition. InterNIC CONTACT INFORMATION The new InterNIC phone number is 800-444-4345. Email is info@internic.net. This number has been in service since April 1, 1993. It reaches a voice menu that allows you to choose from the following options: 1 - REGISTRATION SERVICES Direct dial: 703-742-4777 Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) Email:hostmaster@rs.internic.net Herndon, VA FTP: rs.internic.net 2 - DIRECTORY AND DATABASE SERVICES Direct dial: 908-668-6587 AT&T FAX: 908-668-3763 5000 Handley Road, Room 1B13 Email: admin@ds.internic.net South Plainfield, NJ 07080 FTP: ds.internic.net 3 - INFORMATION SERVICES Direct dial: 619-455-4600 General Atomics Email: info@internic.net San Diego, CA FTP: is.internic.net 4 - INFORMATION SERVICES REFERENCE DESK Choose this when it is unclear where to go first. TRANSITION LIST OF NNSC SERVICES * NNSC Help Desk The NNSC Telephone Hotline Number, 1-617-873-3400, is now forwarded to 1-800-444-4345. The Electronic Help Mailbox address now forwards mail for nnsc@nnsc.nsf.net to info@internic.net . * NNSC Anonymous FTP and the NNSC Info-Server INFORMATION SERVICES on is.InterNIC.net maintains and distributes the Service Provider Referral lists and the Internet Monthly Reports. DIRECTORY AND DATABASE SERVICES on ds.InterNIC.net now maintains the resource-guide and policies-procedures collection, and is accepting new entries for them. The resource-guide is no longer available in PostScript and will not be mailed out to subscribers, but all resource-guide subscribers have been place on a new mailing list, and will receive announcements of new entries to the AT&T resource collection. Shadow copies of the rfc, iesg, ietf, internet-drafts, and isoc directories are now on ds.InterNIC.net, and Issues of "the-scientist", a bi-weekly newspaper published by the Institute for Scientific Information, has also moved. The NNSC, on nnsc.nsf.net, no longer maintains documents that are now available by on ds.internic.net or is.internic.net. * NSF Network Newsletter After the NNSC publishes the final issue of the NSF Network Newsletter, the General Atomics/InterNIC on is.internet.nic will begin to publish a new newsletter for the NSFNET and NREN community. The contact information for people currently on the NNSC mailing list will be transferred to the InterNIC and they will automatically receive this new newsletter. * NSFNET portion of Internet Monthly Report The NSFNET portion of the Internet Monthly Report will be submitted by the General Atomics/InterNIC. For more information, contact the InterNIC at: info@internic.net. * NSF Network Newsletter Map and Site List Although the General Atomics/InterNIC will produce a newsletter, the map and site list from the NSF Network Newsletter will be maintained separately by the AT&T/InterNIC. * Other Services For information about NNSC services not mentioned on this list, please call the new InterNIC phone number 800-444-4345 for information. by Charlotte Mooers MERIT/NSFNET ENGINEERING ------------------------ Significant activities for March included transition of production NSFNET configuration services to the new Informix-based Policy Routing Database; IETF activities (including NSFNET connectivity to the hotel via OARnet); and demonstration of "TUBA" applications over the OSI CLNP infrastructure in the Internet. Projects involving the Merit IE group include development of and experimentation with Route Servers and enhancements to the PRDB to allow configuration of CIDR route aggregation for NSFNET. Status reports on the Inter-Domain Routing Protocol development project, and the Shared Whois Project, are also included here. Policy Routing Database Changes ------------------------------- In March the Merit NSFNET-admin staff completed the cutover to the new, Informix-based, Policy Routing Database system. Design goals for the new system include flexibility to make changes for future routing database needs, though the initial deployment goal was to make the system look as similar as possible to the old system to allow smooth transition for the configuration operations staff. The new system includes enhancements to allow batch updates to be more efficient, and streamlines the configuration file and report generation process. The new system is accessed using a generalized client-server interface, with clients ported to several unix systems (currently they are running on the Sun and IBM RS/6000 systems). The "show" clients for querying the database have been made available for anonymous ftp from merit.edu:pub/src/prdbshow.tar.Z. Projects underway for further development of the system include generation of configuration files for Gated (the routing daemon which will be deployed on the ANS routers), support of route aggregation for Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), configuration support for planned changes to the ANSnet link to CERN in Switzerland, and support for configuration of route servers based on Gated. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Activities During the IETF in Columbus, Ohio from March 29 - April 2, ANS provided connectivity to the Hyatt Regency Columbus workstation room to NSFNET. To support the TUBA demonstration of TCP/UDP transport over the OSI CLNP infrastructure, an RT workstation was deployed in Columbus to provide encapsulation for OSI connectivity. During the BGP Deployment working group meeting, an Internet Draft on support of aggregation in the NSFNET was presented. Merit will support configuration of the backbone to support acceptance of aggregates from midlevel networks, announcement of such aggregates to midlevels, and aggregation on behalf of midlevels whose routers are not configured to support BGP-4. Merit will also implement an Aggregate Registry function which will allow registration by autonomous system peers of aggregations which will be announced between AS neighbors. Discussions of the TUBA approach to the "IP Next Generation" problem took place during the IETF Monday plenary session as well as in two working group sessions. TUBA implementations for six different platforms are underway. Discussion topics included dynamic host NSAP address assignment, mobile hosts, the routing and addressing plan, and TUBA transition strategies. Implementation status as well as implementation and demonstration targets were discussed and agreed on as short term goals. An application document detailing changes needed to application protocols and implementations for TUBA will be written--this document will be useful for the other IPNG working groups as well. At the Network OSI Operations working group meeting, one of the topics discussed was formalization of CLNP operations. There was a call for 24-hour monitoring of OSI routers and hosts. Another goal is policy routing database support for dynamic OSI routing protocols (intra- and inter-domain). Merit agreed to implement an OSI-ping process which will send e-mail for machines which do not respond via CLNP. We will also make the EON configuration file which maps NSAP prefixes to IP addresses for encapsulation available under merit.edu:pub/noop. The IDRP-for-IP working group also met at this IETF. Internet draft documents discussed at this meeting included an IDRP Family document, IDRP-for-IP, IDRP MIB and IDRP-OSPF interactions. IDRP Implementation Status -------------------------- The IDRP implementation within Gated is underway and further progress was made this month. CLNP and IP routes were exchanged between routers using IDRP in Merit's test lab. A demonstration of the IDRP implementation is scheduled for April for the Mitre and FAA groups working on the Aeronautical Telecommunication Network. Deployment of IDRP on the ANS backbone is expected in July of this year. Shared Whois Project -------------------- The project to share data on IP networks and related routing and contact information made progress this month. Merit and RIPE are now regularly sharing data using an agreed-upon "transfer syntax". The InterNIC staff at Network Solutions are working on this project as well. Another aspect of this project is the inclusion of NSFNET routing information in the X.500 Directory. Merit met with the InterNIC NS and AT&T staff and agreed on a schema to allow the InterNIC X.500 whois network entries to point to routing entries at Merit. We expect to have this information online in May. Mark Knopper (mak@merit.edu) NSFNET/INFORMATION SERVICES --------------------------- The Merit Network Information Center (NIC) Services host computer, nic.merit.edu, contains a wide array of information about the Internet, NSFNET, and MichNet and is accessible via Anonymous FTP, electronic mail, Gopher, and WAIS. The directory /introducing.the.internet was developed in cooperation with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) User Documents Working Group and is intended to provide recent information resources which will help the network novice become familiar with the Internet, its associated networks, resources and protocols. New to this directory is John December's "Information Sources: the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication," release 2.30, 15 March 1993. Also of note in the directory /nsfnet/statistics are reports of NSFNET statistics, as they are available, at monthly intervals. The primary tools used to collect the statistics are the SNMP and NNStat software packages. Monthly reports are in sub-directories according to the year in which the data was collected. Other files available in this directory are: history.bytes Growth in traffic on the NSFNET as measured in bytes. Byte traffic measurements are available as of March 1991, and represent the combined byte traffic on the T1 and T3 infrastructures. history.netcount Growth as reflected in the number of domestic and foreign networks having announcement to the NSFNET infrastructures. history.packets Growth in traffic on the NSFNET as measured in packets. As of January 1991, the packet traffic measurements represent the combined traffic on the T1 and T3 infrastructures. history.ports Distribution, by percentage, of most common uses. nets.by.country Distribution, by country, of networks announced by NSFNET. Another in the successful series of Merit Networking Seminars was held in San Francisco, March 15 and 16. BARRNET hosted "Making Your Internet Connection Count: Technology, Tools and Resources," and provided Internet connectivity to the demonstration room at the San Francisco Airport Hilton. Apple Computer, Inc. donated Macintosh computers for use at the conference, enabling the 82 attendees to use e-mail and experiment with the Internet resources and tools discussed. Alan Emtage, co-creator of archie; Mark McCahill, Gopher project leader; and George Brett, National WAIS Clearinghouse; discussed "Information Delivery on the Internet-- Present and Future." Featured speakers included Tom Grundner, creator of the Cleveland Freenet; Perry Samson, U-M Weather Underground; and Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information. Ellen Hoffman, manager of Merit Information Services, and Laura Kelleher, Merit Information Services, attended the meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) which convened in San Francisco March 20-23. Doug VanHouweling, Vice Provost for Information Technology Division at the University of Michigan, spoke on the future of national networking as a representative of EDUCOM. IETF in Columbus (OH) was well attended by Merit Internet Engineering and Merit Information Services staff: chairing working groups were Sue Hares, NOOPS; Ellen Hoffman, UserDoc; Pat Smith, NISI; Chris Weider, IIIR and IDS. Mark Davis-Craig chaired the BOF "Low-Cost IP Hardware Wish-List," which made recommendations to FARNET on an RFI to vendors, an inventory of existing solutions, and a matrix of costs and responsibilities for buyers. Susan R. Harris, Susan M. Horvath, Dale Johnson, Sheri Repucci and Steven J. Richardson participated in several sessions; Mark Knopper, manager of Merit Internet Engineering, discussed the status of the NSFNET in the plenary session. Elise Gerich, Merit Internet Engineering and recently elected to the IAB, attended a meeting of an IEPG subgroup to discuss the Global Internet Exchange (GIX). Gerich also traveled to Moscow, Russia, to participate in discussions regarding the creation of a Russian Space Science Internet. Jo Ann Ward (jaw@merit.edu) SDSC (SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER) ------------------------------------- SDSC Network Activities ======================= The new CSUnet router has arrived and been installed at SDSC. We have registered new domains for the metacenter effort - metacenter.edu and metacenter.dni.us. Additionally, our two network test probes for NCEnet research arrived and our being tested. We adjusted the MTU on our Cray from 32k to 16k. This will serve as a work around to a bug in our Emulex terminal servers which can not handle larger values. SDSC hosted the first Torrey Mesa MAN planning meeting during March. A second is planned for April. And, as it has been for the last several months, the building fiber install moves forward. by Paul Love UCL ---- UCL are now attached to the SuperJANET network at 140Mbps and video has been demonstrated at 2Mbps via Birmingham. UCL assisted Van Jacobson testing new IP encapsulated IP multicast tunnel code for the Mbone routers. The UCL CAR Conferencing system has been ported to Sun RPC and is being ported to Solaris. Peter Kirstein and Tony Ballardie attended the IETF in Columbus, Ohio. John Crowcroft (j.crowcroft@CS.UCL.AC.UK) UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ---------------------- 1. We have completed changes in both the DEC Ultrix 4.2a and Sun SunOS 4.1.1 Unix kernels to improve timekeeping quality with the Network Time Protocol. In the case of the DECstation 5000/240, they reduce the jitter from almost 4 milliseconds to about 20 microseconds. In the case of the Sun 4/65, they reduce the jitter in half to about 40 microseconds. Since the phase-lock loop is now in the kernel, stability is improved as well to about one part-per-million. This allows the interval between network updates to be increased, as well as reduces the time to converge following reboot. 2. The current distribution of the Network Time Protocol Version 3 has been augmented with several new timecode receiver drivers, including two for the Global Positioning Service (GPS) and one each for the German DCF77 system and U.S. Navy Omega system. With these drivers, redundant NTP primary (stratum 1) service is potentially available worldwide. Ports for several new Unix workstations, including DEC Alpha (OSF/1) and Sun SysV (Solaris), are near completion. Improved facilities to capture precision signals generated by some timecode receivers have resulted in accuracy improvements to the order of 40 microseconds with fast workstations and networks. 3. Through the kindness of the U.S. Coast Guard, we now have a cesium clock onsite, as well as a motley collection of GPS, WWV, WWVB, CHU and LORAN-C timing equipment. Efforts lasting over a year have not been able to identify the source of interference that disrupts WWVB reception in our area, so we have switched the master clock for our local nets and DARTnet to a GPS receiver. A second GPS receiver at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories provides backup timing for DARTnet. 4. We are collaborating with Judah Levine at National Institutes of Science and Technology, Boulder, CO, in an experimental evaluation of the NIST Automatic Computer Time Service. The ACTS service is accessed via telephone modem with automatic correction for propagation delay. One of our hosts is set up to dial the ACTS service on a periodic basis, with performance measured using NTP and our master clock. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) WISCNET ------- The DDS links connecting UW-Parkside and the Medical College of Wisconsin to UW-Milwaukee were replaced with SMDS service. We had considerable initial difficulties with the provider's switch shutting down the lines but these were cleared up by new software from the switch manufacturer. WiscNet now has two T1 points of connection to CICNet. A new one from UW-Milwaukee to CICNet at Downer's Grove and another at UW-Madison. WiscNet and CICNet worked jointly to route Milwaukee area through the UW-Milwaukee connection, other traffic flows through the UW-Madison connection. The WiscNet Board of Directors held a planning retreat 3/25/93 through 3/26/93. A user conference will be held on 4/28 and 4/29 at UW-Stevens Point. The conference concentrates on locating Internet resources with the theme 'where in the world is...?' The keynote speaker is Connie Stout, Program Director, Texas Education Commission. More information on request. Michael Dorl 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 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 Feb 3-4 ISOC Symposium on network and Distributed System Security, San Diego (nessett@llnl.gov) 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) ========================================================================