[IMR] IMR86-07.TXT JULY 1986 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 task forces and contractors in the ARPA Internet Research Program. This report is for research use only, and is not for public distribution. Each task force and contractor 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 ARPANET mail to Westine@B.ISI.EDU. Reports are requested from BBN, LINKABIT, ISI, LL, MIT-LCS, NTA, SRI, and UCL. Other groups are invited to report newsworthy events or issues. BBN LABORATORIES AND BBN COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION --------------------------------------------------- DIAMOND MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM We have developed a new release (2.0) of the Diamond System. Included in this release are fixes to bugs as well as several new features, including: * X.400 message transport system for multimedia messages: This system is completely compatible with the MPM in that it obeys the MPM protocol if a message is directed to a host that runs MPM rather than X.400 1 * Printing of documents: Support for printing Diamond documents on Imagen 8/300 laser printers. * MMConf Multimedia Conferencing Prototype: A prototype multimedia conferencing system that allows multiple participants to confer over Diamond multimedia documents. Requests for obtaining the Diamond system should be sent to Kathy Huber (KHuber@A.BBN.COM). VAX UNIX NETWORKING In the month of July, work continued on the port of Stanford University's internet multicast software to 4.3 BSD Unix. A new protocol specification was received from Steve Deering at Stanford, and the port has been updated to meet the specification. Debugging and testing of the software is still pending the arrival of 4.3 BSD Unix at BBN. WIDEBAND NETWORK On July 15 and 16, a new Butterfly gateway was installed at the ISI Wideband Network site, connecting the ISI BSAT and a local Ethernet. The BSAT was configured so that the new gateway could interface to the BSAT via a 2 Mbps connection. This configuration was chosen to support experimentation with NETBLT protocol based file transfers between ISI and MIT via the Wideband Network. During the same ISI site visit, the ISI Voice Funnel machine was upgraded to exclusively use 1-Mb Butterfly processor nodes and a VLSI Butterfly switch. The ISI BSAT was also upgraded to use 1-Mb processor nodes. All BSATs other than those at CMU and M/A-COM Linkabit are now 1-Mb node machines. On July 25, the DCEC BSAT and the DARPA Wideband Butterfly Gateway machines were shipped. Installation is scheduled for August 4. The BSAT and gateway will be connected via a T1 terrestrial link. The maximum datagram message size for the Wideband Network was increased to 2048 bytes. The increase is supported by the network's use of QPSK modulation and datagram fragmentation on the satellite channel. The Butterfly Gateways will implement the new maximum message size. A facility for fixed group (multicast) addressing was implemented and will be included in the next BSAT software release. This feature will support 3-(or more) way conferences between Wideband sites. 2 GATEWAYS We completed testing a new release of software (Rel. 3.2) which we believe will fix the problems encountered in the SATNET Butterfly Internet Gateways. We have been running this new software in two operational gateways at BBN for about a week and are planning to install it in machines at other sites this week. After it has run sucessfully in the CSS (Arpanet-Satnet) gateway we install the new software in the European Satnet gateways (NTA, RSRE, CNUCE, and UCL). SATNET This month, the SATNET continued to be stable. Joachim Kaiser (Kaiser Inc.) began working with Linkabit and COMSAT to assure a supply of spare PSP modems. There were some problems in the links to the local user sites. In mid-July there was a brief break in service between the SATNET and the ARPANET when both US gateways went down due to air conditioning and power problems. Also, since the new Butterfly gateways are going through their first months of real-live SATNET use, connectivity between the SATNET and the local networks at RSRE, CNUCE and NTARE has been variable. The PDP-11s at DCEC and UCL have continued to provide reliable service. Bob Hinden ISI --- Internet Concepts Project Paul Mockapetris attended the Internet Engineering Task Force Meeting at the University of Michigan, 22-24 July. Annette DeSchon made a number of performance improvements to the XEROX TCP and FTP implementations which run in the XEROX Development Environment on the 8010 workstation. She is also developing a domain name resolver which will be accessed via the standard software interfaces in the XEROX DARPA protocols package, as well as by a special purpose test tool running in the XDE. This "NameTool" may be used to send queries to the various domain nameservers in the Internet, and to display their responses. Multimedia Conferencing Project Brian Hung completed the first application on the IBM-PC AT workstation based on the newly specified set of data and control structures. This application allows a user to scan, clip and display documents on the high resolution screen continuously. The user specifies the contrast and brightness parameters for the document to be scanned, the top left hand coordinates and the 3 width and length of the new frame to be clipped from the scanned document and the top left hand screen coordinates of the top left hand corner of the new frame. The next step is to develop more functions (e.g. write_to_file, read_from_file) and parallel control structure (i.e. to enable simultaneous outputs to two procedures) to allow a more varied set of applications to be generated. Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project Alan Katz is currently attending the Super Computing Workshop at Cornell University. The installation of the Butterfly Gateway to the Wideband Net at ISI has allowed us to resume testing of FTP transfers across that net. Unfortunately we're still bumping into apparent 16K window size limits in host TCP implementations; investigations continue. Meanwhile we are also testing raw capacity with ICMP echo request packets which have no window or timeout constraints. Further NETBLT protocol testing is planned for next month as well. Steve Casner Computer Center No internet-related progress to report. LINCOLN LAB ----------- No Internet-related progress to report. Jim Forgie LINKABIT -------- 1. The NSFNET Backbone is now alive at six of the planned seven sites. Lots of folks at the various supercomputer sites, especially Hans-Werner Braun at the University of Michigan, worked feverishly to solve or at least contain the bizarre bugs that still munch on several campus networks. 2. Hans-Werner and I managed to confirm that the core system responds to EGP hop counts, chosing the path of least total hops, where total hops includes the contribution from the EGP hop-count field provided by the non-core gateway. Our experiment involved two gateways between the NSFNET Backbone complex and the ARPANET. One gateway specified a hop count of zero and the other one, with the effect that the core used the zero-hop path. Then the zero-hop 4 path was disabled, with the effect the core used the one-hop path. This provides for a normal and backup path between the Backbone and ARPANET, but is considered only an interim solution. 3. I attended the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting and discussed several issues arising from the NSFNET activities. I also raised many of these issues in messages exchanged via the TCP-IP list. 4. The CNUCE (Pisa, Italy) fuzzball sputtered briefly to life and then fell victim of a broken disk. Blasco Bonito of CNUCE, Roki Rokitanski of DFVLR and I managed to confirm reachability of the Italian swamp via the Fucino SATNET station. 5. I began working on routing mechanisms for the new DARPA/RADC Multiple-Satellite System (MSS), which is a wonderful can of worms. I constructed and am studying a number of scenarios, some based on traditional ARPANET-style routing, some considerably more bizarre. 6. I rebuilt the fuzzball namesolver and nameserver to improve performance in the face of flaky Internet connectivity observed recently. Our ARPANET access line also began behaving badly, which is now under repair. 7. My next report will be dispatched from the University of Delaware, where I will become Professor of EE starting about 1 September. I intend to continue punching Internet bags as usual, so you may not even notice the change. Dave Mills MIT-LCS ------- No report received. NTA & NDRE ---------- No report received. PROTEON ------- A lot has happened in the past several months, but I've been too busy to make up reports. On the less technical side, Release 7.1 of the gateway is out; it includes the network interface reliability features mentioned in the April report. The EGP code from the PDP11 was also brought up. It also includes support for 1822LH/DH 5 interfaces and synchronous point-point links, through a variety of level adaptors. The synchronous links only run at low and medium speeds, due to restrictions in the Zilog SCC USART (which are difficult to work with; we can lend a hand to anyone having problems with these chips). Work programming a faster chip (capable of running at T1 speeds) is well along. Also, a great deal of work has been done to support extensive testing in gateway production; a test rig in manufacturing completely simulates the destination operating environment of the gateway, allowing all the interface hardware to be tested with the operational software configured for the actual network addresses it will run at. Several other projects are also completed, and will be included in the next release. A remote console capability (using standard TCP server TELNET) is one, and cross network dumping of crashes to allow fault analysis is another. We have also investigated higher performance Ethernet boards; we have noticed that the Interlan Ethernet board we are using could not match the performance of the ring interface (which was admittedly designed for high performance in light of early experience at MIT with high speed interfaces). We have implemented a driver for the Excelan smart card, which is commonly viewed as a high performance interface, and while it does have a maximum bit rate three times higher with large packets, we did not record any improvement on the packets/second figures. We are evaluating the other commercially available Ethernet interfaces in an attempt to find one which has the high throughput we want; most seem to have confused 'smart' with 'fast'. We'd like to hear from anyone with good experiences with high speed Ethernet interfaces. Also, we have been seeing lots of problems with the RIP IGP (distributed with Berkeley UNIX) in some of our larger and more complicated customer sites. We are currenlty investigating this and hope to have some results to report in an RFC and to the INENG group. Finally, I attended the INARC meeting at BBN, 8-9 May. Noel Chiappa SRI --- 1. The final demonstration of the reconstitution protocols was conducted on June 27 at Omaha. The F9 demonstration involved a network-mobile host (SUN 150 onboard a SAC aircraft) flying from a PRNET based around Camp Dodge, Iowa, into a PRNET based around Omaha, NE. The SUN in the aircraft was in communications via the ARPANET to a VAX at SRI. Because of antenna orientation, the aircraft was isolated from both PRNETs for a short period of time. The demonstration successfully showed the ability of the 6 RP gateways to track the SUN host as it moved from network to network along with the end-to-end reliability of TCP. Jim Mathis UCL --- 1. Further work has gone into improving the performance of the C version of our TCP. Some major bugs were found and fixed; this improved the performance dramatically compared to what it had been. 2. The UCL Internet probe (which uses ICMP echoes) was ported from an LSI-11 on a Cambridge Ring to a SUN on an Ethernet. 3. A reverse ARP client was written for hosts running our C version of the MOS operating system. This talks to any (release 3.0) SUN RARP server. 4. Much effort has gone into our Rugby Clock experiment, which is intended to develop a Time Service supporting the Network Time Protocol. After some initial success, various problems have slowed recent progress. Along the way, we discovered that the clocks on our Olivetti and IBM PCs drift apart by up to 8 seconds per minute relative to each other. 5. Two papers were submitted to journals: "Managing Heterogeneity in Computer Network Interconnection" by Robert Cole, submitted to Software Practice and Experience; and "OSI Transport Protocol - User Experience" by Robert Cole and Peter Lloyd, submitted to IEEE Communications Magazine. 6. Michael Wallace and Jerry Mulvenna of NBS visited UCL and talked with Peter Kirstein and Steve Kille. The main topics were SMTP/X.400 gatewaying in the light of UCL work, and the DoD contract held by NBS for work in this area. Peter Lloyd 7 TASK FORCE REPORTS ------------------ APPLICATIONS No report received. END-TO-END SERVICES MULTICASTING and HOST GROUPS A new RFC has been released containing a further definition of the proposed Internet multicasting mechanism (see RFC966). Steve Deering, "Host Extensions for IP Multicasting", RFC988, July 1986. THE INTERNET RESEARCH COMMUNITY IS URGED TO READ THIS DOCUMENT AND COMMENT ON IT, as we intend to push towards its adoption as an official extension to the Internet architecture. Steve Deering has completed his second-version implementation of a multicast agent under the Stanford V-kernel. This code is available for distribution, and can be brought up on a dedicated Sun workstation or Microvax II to to provide multicasting on a 3MB or 10Mb Ethernet. We hope to provide a (limited!) number of CPU's for running the V-based agent code, for sites that want to experiment with the multicasting facility. Contact the TF chairman (braden@isi.edu) if you are interested. Karen Lam at BBN is working on modifications to the 4.3BSD kernel to allow a host to use Internet multicasting (Level 2, as defined in RFC988). She has completed initial coding of the mods to 4.3BSD and is just entering the compile/test/debug phase. She hopes to have it working by the end of August (after the implementors' workshop in Monterey), so it can be tested at Stanford against Steve's multicast agents. Eric Cooper at CMU has involved a number of students (from Alfred Spector's Camelot project) in the design of possible multicast applications. Their goal is to describe areas in the Camelot design where unreliable (IP level) and reliable multicast (RPC level) will be used. BULK TRANSFER PROTOCOLS Annette DeSchon (ISI) has been continuing work with Mark Lambert of MIT on NETBLT protocol performance testing over the Wideband 8 network, between MIT and ISI. The fastest data rate that has been observed so far is 228K bits per second. Based on their measurements, the limiting factor appears to be the Ethernet interface of the IBM PC/AT. Therefore, these tests will be repeated using MIT's Symbolics LISP implementation as soon as the appropriate hardware becomes available. ISI is also looking into the feasibility of porting NETBLT to the Sun 3 workstation. Gerd Beling (FGAN) and Bob Braden (ISI) did some thinking about selective acknowledgments within the context of TCP. Existing TCP implementations are generally tuned for short-delay paths, and perform poorly over satellite circuits, for example. The selective acknowledgment mechanism is being proposed as a (compatible) extension which will allow a single TCP implementation to be able to function efficiently over a much broader range of delays than is currently possible. TRANSACTION PROTOCOLS Dave Cheriton is continuing work on his VTMP protocol at Stanford. An experimental version of the V distributed system is running with VMTP, loading programs and reading/writing files. A few bugs remain. Dave will give a talk on VMTP at SIGCOMM, and is thinking about an RFC which will contain a (revised) VMTP specification. Eric Cooper at CMU is looking at the possible application of VMTP for network message forwarders within Mach. Eric Cooper and Karen White, while they were at Berkeley, developed a remote procedure call mechanism for Berkeley Unix, based upon the well-known Birrell&Nelson work. Their code was integrated with the 4.2BSD kernel for efficiency. It would be highly desirable for this code to be distributed as part of a future BSD release, so other groups can experiment with RPC. Jim Stevens, working on the SURAN packet radio effort, is designing another Birrell&Nelson derivative called TTP, or "Transaction Transport Protocol". There will be a session at the upcoming TCP/IP Vendors' Workshop on transaction protocols. 9 DATA STRUCTURING Eric Cooper at CMU has been benchmarking the Courier structured-data represention. He has timings and detailed profiles for a standard example based upon a complex RFC822 header. One of Dave Clark's students is working on the same example, using the structured-data representations in USP and X.409. Bob Braden INTERNET ARCHITECTURE 1. Many of the INARCers are also INENGers and attended that meeting in Ann Arbor this month. There are so many hot issues buzzing with NSFNET and the explosive growth in connectivity that it's hard to separate the near-term and far-term plates. Several agenda ideas for the next INARC meeting emerged and will be pursued. 2. In response to suggestions from the members of both task forces, as well as the IAB, we are planning to coordinate the next INARC and INENG meetings with the IAB meeting at RIACS in October. The present plan is for the groups to meet together for one day and separately for the other. Dave Mills INTERNET ENGINEERING No report received. INTEROPERABILITY No report received. PRIVACY Plans for the next Privacy Task Force meeting, to be held on 11-12 September at University College London, were finalized. Work was performed on generating a draft RFC entitled "Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail" for distribution to Task Force members and review at the London meeting. The Task Force welcomed a new member: Mike Padlipsky of Mitre/Bedford. John Linn 10 ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY No report received. SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING The first meeting of the Task Force on Scientific Networks was held at NASA Ames Research Center, Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science on June 26-27, 1986. Attending were: Ron Bailey, NAS, NASA Ames (1st day) Bob Braden, ISI Bob Brown, RIACS, NASA Ames Steve Casner, ISI Alan Katz, ISI Keith Lantz, Stanford Jim Leighton, NMFECC Barry Leiner, RIACS, NASA Ames Creon Levit, NAS, NASA Ames (1st day) Milo Medin, Bendix, NASA Ames Mike Muuss, BRL Ari Ollikainen, NAS/GE, NASA Ames David Roode, BIONET Peter Shames, STSI 1. The charter of the task force was reviewed and a general discussion took place of the role of the internet technology in supporting the scientific community. 2. The afternoon of the first day was spent discussing the interactions between workstations and supercomputers and the kinds of transactions required for scientific use over the network. 3. The morning of the second day was spent on two applications that require networking. These were structured graphics and distributed ray-tracing. 4. The afternoon was spent discussing support of collaborative research, particularly using multimedia conferencing. The next meeting is scheduled for November 13-14 at Livermore. At that time, we will identify some specific work topics for the task force. SECURITY No report received. 11 TACTICAL INTERNET No report received. TESTING AND EVALUATION No report received. 12