[IMR] IMR88-04.TXT APRIL 1988 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 research use only, and is not for public distribution. 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 (Westine@ISI.EDU) or Karen Roubicek (Roubicek@NNSC.NSF.NET). BBN LABORATORIES AND BBN COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION --------------------------------------------------- WIDEBAND NETWORK The major focus of this month's development activities was the implementation and installation of Wideband Network support for a number of cross-country 56 Kbps Arpanet Inter-Switch Trunks (IST). This Wideband Network support is provided via the direct connection of Arpanet PSN trunk interfaces to local BSATs, and the transparent transmission of the PSN's trunk traffic to a corresponding BSAT-PSN pair at another site on the opposite coast. This transmission facility is provided via new IST support software in the BSAT, which is capable of encapsulating PSN-to-PSN packet fragments within the standard Wideband message format and then sending these messages within pre-established dedicated satellite channel stream capacity. This results in what appears to the PSN pair as a 56 Westine [Page 1]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 Kbps terrestrial line with a long propagation delay. Two of the three planned Wideband-based ISTs (one running between ISI and BBN and another between ISI and DCEC) were providing connectivity to their respective PSNs as of the end of the month. There are still, however, some problems that need to be corrected in these links, since the PSNs attached to them have to date been reporting an unusually large number of line up/down transitions. This situation is being investigated and will be corrected as soon as possible. The third IST, which will run between SRI and DCEC, has not yet become operational due to an I/O board failure at SRI. A replacement has been shipped and will be installed upon receipt. SATNET The SATNET has been very stable through the month of April. We have had no unscheduled outages of the SATNET SIMP's or PSP terminal hardware. The availability of the SATNET was again above 99% from tests run by ISI for all sites except Tanum. Scheduled repositioning of the Tanum dish has been taking the site off the channel periodically. The only other outages during the month were scheduled SATNET Measurement Taskforce tests. The UCL to RSRE line was upgraded to the new service and operated for a short time last month. A problem developed with the line and it was turned back over to BT. It appears that the problem has been resolved. The link has been up for several days. VAX TCP/IP NETWORKING David Waitzman, Craig Partridge, and Robb Foster met with Steve Deering at Stanford to discuss the implementation of multicast routing in 4.3bsd and the Butterfly gateways. BBN is currently working with Steve to develop a list of work items that we expect to finish between now and the end of August. INTERNET R&D On Tues (4/12/88) MILSRI gateway was upgraded to an 11/73 processor. This completes the upgrade of all Mailbridges and EGP servers to 11/73s. Many thanks to Bob Enger for finding hardware donors and for coordinating the installation effort. Also thanks to the following people for the donation of processors and memory. Phil Karn Bellcore 7 processors Paul Pomes U of Illinois 1 processor 3 memory boards Bob Enger Contel 1 processor 3 memory boards Dan Tappan BBN 1 processor 1 memory board Westine [Page 2]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 Bill Nesheim Thinking Machine 1 processor 1 memory board Mike Petry U of Maryland 2 processors Our work on Internet multicast is continuing. We plan to extend the SPF routing in the Butterfly Gateway to distribute the Multicast group membership among other Butterfly Gateways. We also began work on implementing an Improved Packet Radio (IPR) interface for the Butterfly Gateway. Bob Hinden (Hinden@BBN.COM) ISI --- Internet Concepts Project Paul Mockapetris presented the domain system to NNSC Domain Tutorial at BBN, Cambridge, Mass, April 28-29. Jon Postel attended the CERFNET meeting in Long Beach, CA. Jon Postel to attend NSF EXPRES review meeting at CMU, Pittsburgh, PA, April 6-8. Three RFCs were published this month. RFC 1050: Sun Microsystems, Inc., "RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol Specification", April 1988. RFC 1052: Cerf, V., "IAB Recommendations for the Development of Internet Network Management Standards", NRI, April 1988. RFC 1053: Levy, S., T. Jacobson, "Telnet X.3 PAD Option", Minnesota Supercomputer Center, April 1988. Ann Westine (Westine.ISI.EDU) Multimedia Conferencing Project Preparations are underway to expand the packet video system to more than two sites. The on-board firmware of the Image 30 video codec has been modified to accept a merged packet stream of data from multiple sites and display each site in its own quadrant of the screen. The standard product Image 30, with its circuit-switched interface, can only handle a single site. Some changes are still needed in the the packet video program (PVP) that runs in the Butterfly to use the new codec scheme. Westine [Page 3]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 Meanwhile, PVP has been modified to checksum all video data and discard damaged packets since we observed an unusually high number of screen glitches in transmissions from BBN to ISI. Because the error rate is asymmetrical, a hardware fault is suggested. PVP is also being modified to use both point-to-point and conference modes of ST protocol connections to prepare for testing with the Butterfly ST Gateway. Work is also underway to expand the conference control program that runs in a small window on the Sun screen. In addition to the video camera control functions, the program will be used to establish voice and video conference connections. We expect this program will make the conference system easier for novice users to manage. Steve Casner, Eve Schooler, Dave Walden (Casner@ISI.EDU, Schooler@ISI.EDU, djwalden@isi.edu) Brian Hung is in the final stages of completing his echo cancellor assembly language code and is beginning the debugging process. Brian Hung (Hung@ISI.EDU) NSFNET Project The major projects this month have been finishing and documenting the Background File Transfer program, and working on the Host Requirements draft RFC. An RFC on BFTP is nearly ready for submission. Bob Braden also chaired a meeting of the End-to-End Task Force at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, April 12-13. Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon (Braden@ISI.EDU, DeSchon@ISI.EDU) Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project Alan Katz worked on a second version of the Mandlebrot set graphics viewer that runs under the X Window system. This version will separate the "back end" fractal calculation from the "front end" X interactive display. Alan intends to then run back end part on a remote supercomputer. Alan Katz (Katz@ISI.EDU) Westine [Page 4]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 MIT-LCS ------- Our network simulator started to play its role in network studies. Mark Lambert has been using it to investigate flow rate adjusting algorithms for NETBLT, based on observed network behavior at the end point. Andrew Heybey is simulating a distributed data rate tuning algorithm proposed by Mosely. The slow control convergence of the algorithm, which had no explanation before, was quickly revealed to be due to the queueing delay effect on propagating control information. We are sorry to announce that Mark Lambert, the implementor of both PCmail and NETBLT protocol, is leaving us for Oracle in May. We wish him best of luck in his new career and married life. Lixia Zhang (Lixia@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU) MITRE Corporation ----------------- 1. The "DoD OSI Implementation Strategy" has been delivered to DCA. When it has past OSD inspection, it could be released for public comsumption in June. The timing could be directly related to the release of the GOSIP FIPS. 2. The FTP/FTAM application bridge is complete; it has been updated to reflect current ISODE, NBS Implementors Agreements, and FTAM IS status. The documentation is complete as well; however, the timeliness of obtaining public release from the government is variable. 3. The VTP implementation has been upgraded to reflect current ISODE, NBS Implementors Agreements, and 2nd DIS VT status. It contains a TELNET profile and a rudimentary Forms Mode profile which currently supports the Honeywell VIP terminal for demonstration purposes. The TELNET profile is complete; the Forms Mode will be complete in September. We are interested in testing partners. 4. For the internet engineering testbed, the instrumented DoD gateway, the instrument host, traffic generators, simple date base system, and a remote experiment initiating process are complete. Four classes of experiments relating to congestion control are planned for development over the remainder of this fiscal year: a) Van Jacobson's TCP improvements; b) TCP rate base evaluation; c) Source Quench evaluation; d) gateway Westine [Page 5]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 fairness methods. 5. We are preparing another Internet Engineering Plan with a scope for FY90 - FY92 for DCA. All contributions to problems in current technologies, solutions that are feasible or need work to evaluate feasibility, or efforts that should be planned to use future technologies are appreciated. Ann Whitaker (Whitaker@Gateway.Mitre.Org) NTA-RE and NDRE --------------- No report received. SRI --- Internet Research Two papers: "A Distributed, Loop-Free, Shortest-Path Routing Algorithm" at IEEE INFOCOM '88, New Orleans; and "Distributed Routing Using Internodal Coordination," at IEEE Computer Networking Symposium '88, Washington, D.C. are presented by J.J. Garcia-Luna. Both papers describe a new distributed algorithm for the dynamic calculation of the shortest paths in a computer network. The algorithm is loop-free at every instant, independent of transmission and processing delays in the network, or changes in topology. J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves (garcia@tsca.istc.sri.com) UCL --- Infrastructure: We have been testing the Cisco X.25 with our own X.25 IP tunnel code and doing some preliminary performance tests in preparation for the new UK-US Academic service link. With suitable X.25 parameter settings we see a very reasonable percentage of the line bandwidth available for TCP/IP. Plans to install two high speed networks at UCL, one a proprietary fibre net for CS, the other a true FDDI network for the entire college, are now fairly complete. We are surveying the available network management tools to see what could be used for configuration control and fault isolation for such a system. The Westine [Page 6]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 college network will connect most large departments, using MAC Bridges, with possible direct connection of high performance servers. We are obliged to operate a multi-protocol system, with DECNET and TCP/IP pre-dominating, but XNS and OSI protocols already running in some departements, we need an integrated solution to management urgently. Research: Hinting has been added to the Thorn directory service, so that DUAs may now transparently locate other DSAs on behalf of a user. This has highlighted some problems with the authentication architecture of the X.500 directory standard. John Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK) UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ---------------------- 1. In order to gain some insight into the effect of source-quench mechanisms in Internet gateways, Mike Minnich has developed a simulation model that drives the generation of quench messages as a closed-loop control system. Initial experiments with this model have shown that the stability of the system can be very sensitive to variations in the delay parameters of the model. This leads us to believe that the design of high- performance congestion-avoidance mechanisms may require dynamic measurement of delay parameters in order to fine-tune the feedback loop and avoid oscillations. 2. Mike Minnich has also been beta-testing the Unix NTP daemon developed by Mike Petry at the University of Maryland. We have it running on several of our VAXen as well as a Sun in our lab. Some initial portability problems were discovered and subsequently corrected. The clockwatchers among you who have not yet converted to the new daemon may well want to do so, since it has much thicker firewalls than previous versions. Those who run bind and NTP on the same machine should be especially appreciative of this: timewarps into the past cause bind to empty its cache and enter a somewhat rigid state of catatonia for the duration of the warp. 3. A considerable quantity of NTP data collected on the NTP primary time servers was analyzed for hints on NSFNET Backbone performance and possible glitches. A version of the S statistical package was used along with ad-hoc data extraction Westine [Page 7]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 programs to produce a set of graphs found useful for diagnosing network swamp fever. Perhaps the most useful of these graphs is what might be called a wedge diagram, a scatter diagram of clock offset versus delay, which often reveals subtle path characteristics like unsuspected asymmetry and route flaps. 4. The analysis uncovered what appears to be occasional severe congestion on X.25 links used by U Maryland gateways, as well as curious behavior on the Backbone routing somewhere between the Rockies (NCAR) and the ARPANET. It also clearly shows route flapping over terrestrial and satellite paths between ISI and the Atlantic states. The present state of the analysis, including suggestions for incorporating the ideas into AI-based network-management systems, was incorporated into a memo distributed to the INENG and NSF technical communities. 5. The document "Network Time Protocol (Version 1): Specification and Implementation" was distributed as a Department report and submitted for consideration as an RFC. A simple simulator was built for the synchronization and filtering algorithms described in that document and presented with off-air data collected over various network paths in the US and Europe. Detailed statistics and performance data were produced for possible inclusion in a future paper. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) Westine [Page 8]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 NSF NETWORKING -------------- NSF NETWORKING UCAR/BBN LABS NNSC Approximately 90 technical liaisons from NSFNET sites attended the NNSC two-day tutorial on the Domain System April 28 and 29. The course covered general information about the domain system and details on hooking up specific systems. Craig Partridge attended the End-2-End meeting and hosted a meeting of the Management Information Base Working Group at the NNSC. Karen Roubicek attended the FARnet meeting and the Net'88 Conference in Washington. by Karen Roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net) NSFNET BACKBONE PROJECT CORNELL UNIVERSITY THEORY CENTER Cornell will be receiving additional funding for the continued operation of the current NSFNet backbone until July 1. In that this is not full funding, a few tasks have to be eliminated. They are as follows: 1) Operations will no longer be 24 hours. We will continue to deal with all problems between the hours of 9am and 5pm EST. 2) No additional networks will be added to the backbone. The addition of new networks would only increase the likelyhood of problems on the backbone. We feel that it would be unwise and unfair to our current user base to continue adding new networks regardless of the level funding. Jeff Honig has been devoted to gated development in support of the new NSFnet backbone. He spent three days at IBM Yorktown working with Yakov Rehkter modifing's gated's EGP code for use on the NSS Routing Control Processors. Since his return most of his time has been spent enhancing gated for support of the regional side of NSS-regional communications with some time spent with further enhancements for the NSS side. by Martyne M. Hallgren (martyne@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu) Westine [Page 9]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 NEW NSFNET BACKBONE Significant progress has been made on the backbone project since the last Internet Monthly Report. This was aided by cooperation of the staff at all the NSFNET backbone sites. We are on the verge of installing all the equipment, with the first Nodal Switching Subsystem (NSS) components already shipped to the sites at Boulder, San Diego, Princeton, Champaign, and Ithaca. MCI also completed end-to-end testing (including the CSUs) for several circuits. The NSS pre-assembly process in Ann Arbor is on schedule and continues to operate smoothly. All the NSFNET backbone sites should receive completely configured NSSs by mid-May. Pittsburgh, Lincoln, Ithaca, and Ann Arbor have received their IDNXs and will be contacted shortly by IBM to schedule the installation and assurance testing of this equipment. Ann Arbor's IDNX is already installed and connected to the three circuits of the operational network and to the two test network circuits. Jacob Rekhter of IBM Research is at a very advanced stage with his implementation of ANSI IS-IS SPF-IGP for the new NSFNET Backbone network. This code has been performing very well on the six NSS nodes of the test network. Over the last few weeks, important progress has been made on the EGP interface. The EGP implementation already includes the Autonomous-System-centered improvements which were outlined to the technical people responsible for regional networks by means of two documents and many electronic mail discussions. These two documents have also been submitted for publication as IDEAs. Jeff Honig of the Cornell University Theory Center worked with Jacob Rekhter for a week in Yorktown on the adaptation of the gated EGP code into the NSS environment, as well as on the EGP implementation enhancements necessary for the new backbone. Cornell's significant cooperation, which has also continued after Jeff's visit, was of great assistance to the EGP integration. The changes Jacob and Jeff made to the EGP implementation are also available in new versions of gated His new implementation is now used in a simulated regional network connected to the backbone test network. Host-host communications is now possible while traversing all of the SPF, EGP, and RIP routing environments. by Laura Kelleher (Laura_Kelleher@merit.edu) Westine [Page 10]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 NSFNET BACKBONE AND MID-LEVEL SITES UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN/NCSAnet No report received. JOHN VON NEUMANN NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER This report is designed to inform the JVNC Consortium and JVNCnet network members as well as the Internet community of monthly status of the JVNCnet network. The data used on this report is collected using a number of techniques developed at JVNC, together with data from the JVNC operations group. Network brief: The John von Neumann National Center's high speed network (JVNCnet) connects seven north-east states plus two mid-west states. JVNCnet's 13 Consortium Institutions *, plus JVNC and 10 non Consortium Sites form the 24 node network. The topology of the network (see attached diagram) is a combination of tree and double rings providing redundancy and high bandwidth access to the JVNC center and NSFnet backbone. The high speed links are mostly T1 lines (1.544 millon bits per second), the rest are 56,000 bits per second (both terrestrial and satellite). The routing switches are a combination of VAXs, UB routers and CISCO routers. The network is operated from the JVNCnet Network Operations Center (NOC) lodated at the John von Neumann Center, which is staffed 24 hours/7 days a week. Monthly Status Overview: We are still rerouting all traffic between Penn State and NCAR via JVNCnet and the University of Colorado. The users are very satisfied with the access that they now have to NCAR. We started to reroute the traffic from Prinecton to NCAR via JVNCnet as well, with equal good results. The installation of the 6 new New England schools has been completed on schedule. The overall uptime for the gateways this month (reachability Westine [Page 11]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 information) was 90.45% (worst case). A program was written to detect and remove routing loops on the VAX routers at JVNC and log the occurrences. Traffic on the JVNCA gateway has been very high this month, with a total number of packets in and out (of one of its ethernet interfaces) of 112,647,844 packets. The University of Pennsylvania reterminated the place where the JVNC gateway (and the T1 line) end. This caused a disruption of the service to that campus measured of approximately 20% of this month time (worst case). The access to the Universities of Arizona and Colorado was interrupted twice this month for problems with the satellite equipment. A problem of frequency shift on the radio equipment was corrected by Vitalink once we noticed that the round trip delay started to grow out of normal behavior. Access to the NSFnet sites was of approximately 77% (worst case). The access to Illinois was the more affected one with a worst case reachability of 46%. The JVNC PSN is still not connected to our host. As soon as it is connected and running, we are going to be able to lower the NSFnet backbone traffic considerably (by "draining" all the ARPANET traffic that we currently send/receive to the backbone). A Network Operations Center (JVNCNet NOC) has been established at JVNC to provide better service and coordination to the 24 node network. The NOC is staffed by the network staff from 9am to 5pm Mon-Fri, and is on call between 5pm and 9am. The computer operators monitor and perform minor troubleshooting tasks between 5pm and 9am and provide for backup network operations center. For more Information Contact: Network Operations: JVNCnet NOC, "JVNCnet-noc@jvnca.csc.org" Network Informations: JVNCnet NIC, "JVNCnet-nic@jvnca.csc.org" Westine [Page 12]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 JVNCnet Network Topology ------------------------ Boston U.---Harvard*--MIT*--Brown*--Wesleyan | | | Dartmouth-----Northeastern | Yale | | | Umass (Amherst) | | | | | | ============ | ----------------|| ||------------- || || IAS*-------------------|| ||----------U. of Penn* Montclair State--------|| JVNC ||----------Penn State* NYU*-------------------|| ||----------U. of Colorado* Columbia*--------------|| ||----------Princeton* U. of Arizona*---------|| ||----------Rutgers* Rochester*-------------|| ||----------NJIT**--Stevens** ============ | --------UMDNJ** * CSC Institution ** NRAC Institution by Sergio Heker (heker@jvnca.csc.org) NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH AND UNIVERSITY SATELLITE NETWORK PROJECT Preparations are under way for the acquisition of the NSFnet NSS and the conversion to the new NSFnet. The USAN network, a star configuration of gateways, will be designated an Autonomous System and will use RIP as the IGP. Since the NSS is also a node on this star and it is necessary to communicate routing information to the NSS via EGP, the plan is to use a gated host on the USAN backbone to act as an EGP agent. by Don Morris (morris@scdsw1.ucar.edu) PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER Early in April a Proteon P4200 was installed between the PSC ethernet and an extended section of the University of Pittsburgh ethernet. This gateway gives them a direct connection to PSCnet and access to the NSFnet backbone through our network. On April 21 and 22 the DDS circuits connecting Temple, Drexel, and Lehigh Universities to the University of Pennsylvania were Westine [Page 13]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 reterminated on the new premises of Penn's computing services group. Our networking equipment was moved April 21 and by the next day everything was back in working order. We have continued to offer and provide name service to PSCnet institutions. We are continuing to work out the bugs in the system. Two staff members attended the domain tutorial offered by the NNSC in an effort to better understand the system. Our efforts to connect our second Arpanet gateway to the new PSN on our premises should soon come to fruition, as we finally have the electronics and cables necessary. The gateway machine is being prepared for the connection. Beta tests of a new driver for our Arpanet gateway's X.25 interface to the PSN are continuing. This new driver will allow more virtual circuit connections simultaneously. Equipment has arrived and a line has been installed for a third trunk line to the new PSN #21. MCI technicians have visited our premises to connect and test the CSU's on the new backbone circuits. Equipment racks and the IDNX have been delivered here. During a site visit on April 25 by IBM and Merit representatives several space and environmental issues were resolved. by Dave O'Leary (oleary@godot.psc.edu) SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER The group from "Task Force 100" visited SDSC on April 1. The PSN was upgraded to the current software level (it still had last Aug's version). Concurrently the backpannels were replaced. The team was unable to activate the 2 trunks, however, since: 1. The one to UCLA was terminated - but not in the PSN there 2. The line to ISI was lost (again) in climbing the 12 stories. The p4200 continues without any anomallies. The University of Hawaii will be converting their SDSCnet (MFEnet protocol) line to a p4200 link during the first week of May. NorthWestNet was turned-up in GATED on April 1, as scheduled. Our client RSH is ready for production use on our Cray under CTSS. Westine [Page 14]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 Our VMS systems, using SRI's Multinet, are running 4.8 BIND. Also, we have been running GATED in listen mode for several weeks without a problem. We plan to move our GATED functions from our small SUN (3/50) to one of the VAX's during May. by Paul Love (loveep@sds.sdsc.edu) BARRNET (No report received) MERIT/UMNET Michigan State University now has a functional 56 Kbps link to the ARPANET PSN at Purdue University. A T1 line from Michigan State University to the University of Michigan has been installed. This line, which is jointly funded by Merit and Michigan State University, should become functional very soon. by Laura Kelleher (Laura_Kelleher@merit.edu) MIDNET (No report received) MRNET During April, MRNet held a meeting of the full membership. During this meeting it was proposed that MRNet consider providing different "levels of service", ranging from fully supported 24 hours per day 7 days per week service, to a less expensive limited support mode for those members who do not require 24/7 service. No final decisions were reached on this issue. Several new institutions attended the general meeting, and expressed an interest in joining MRNet. The MRNet equipment was consolidated into a separate room, specifically prepared for use as the MRNet hub. A user who had been using the MRNet network number by mistake was identified, and has subsequently stanched the flow of mislabeled packets. Access to some NSFNet sites (Princeton, for example) was reported as being relatively good during April (at least "better than it was in March"). Access to other sites, including MIT, was irregular, and access to Stanford was reported as being poor. by Ken Carlson (kgc@uf.msc.umn.edu) NORTHWESTNET NorthWestNet has reached a contractual agreement with the University of Washington to provide training coordination for the Westine [Page 15]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 network. The network issued an RFQ to vendors for TCP/IP software that has resulted in group discounts with several vendors. The Management Committee is negotiating final details of Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws which will establish the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium (NWACC) as a 501(c)3 organization. This will be a three-tiered organization with the original primary nodes as full members. Smaller institutions will be Associate Members and for profit organizations will be Affiliate Members. We have had promising discussions with two DOE establishments about joining the network. Both are likely to become members in the near future. We have also had inquiries from several for profit organizations. by Dick Markwood (markwood%vaxf.colorado.edu@cunyvm.cuny.edu) Westine [Page 16]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 NYSERNET NYSERNet had the following topology: Clarkson | Syracuse | NISC || | | || | | Rochester--------Cornell---------RPI---Albany | || || | ....Alfred || || Buffalo...Fredonia || || | ....Oswego || || | || || Binghamton || +-------- || ------StonyBrook | || | || | || | || CUNY--NYTEL/NSMAC--Columbia======NYU==Rockefeller | |\ | | /| | || | | \ | NYNEX/S&T / | | || | | \ BNL / | | WP/CO | | \ / | | | | +-------------POLY---+ | | | | | | | +------------------------------+ | | | +--------------------------------------+ || ==== || T1 || \ | / 56kbits .... 9.6kbits 1) The Syracuse/Cornell link was upgraded to T1. 2) Mark Fedor and Marty Schoffstall participated in the unified network management Management Information Base (MIB) working group of the IETF. 3) Most of the NYSERNet principles participated in the NET88 conference jointly sponsored by Educom/NYSERNet/NSF. by Marty Schoffstall (schoff@nic.nyser.net) Westine [Page 17]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 OARNET (No report received) SESQUINET The complete initially proposed SesquiNet configuration, now augmented by Prairie View A&M, has been operational now for several months. The following campus networks are being served, and are advertised via EGP to the core: Baylor College of Medicine 128.249 BCM-Technologies 192.31.88 Houston Area Research Center 192.31.87 Prairie View A&M University 129.208 Rice University 128.42 Texas A&M University 128.194 Texas Southern University 192.31.101 and the University of Houston 129.7 The serial line from NSFnet/NCAR to SesquiNet/Rice has been operational for several months, and routes to SesquiNet via NSFnet are now being advertised. Performance is very good. As mentioned last month, we have spent considerable time learning how to make effective use of both our Arpanet and our NSFnet connections. It was disappointing, therefore, to learn that our Arpanet IMP (and all the other Arpanet IMPs in Texas) was scheduled to be disconnected on May 1st. We have been spending most of our time preparing for that disconnection. During the last week in April (within three days of the scheduled disconnection of our part of the Arpanet) we finally succeeded in getting the last bug fix to the cisco support for 1822-HDH Arpanet. It works very well. During the coming month, we will be working on configuration changes in anticipation of the new NSFnet backbone site here. We will soon resume our testing cisco's support for dual protocol (IP and DECnet) routing. by Guy Almes (almes@rice.edu) SURANET (No report received) Westine [Page 18]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 WESTNET 1. The circuits for Westnet "West" were installed near the end of this month, providing connectivity to Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, and Utah State University. All circuits for Westnet are now in place. We are just now testing these circuits. Routing across these circuits should commence imminently. 2. We had some minor problems with Cisco's implementation of hello due to a change Dave Mills had made in the timing metric. This has been fixed. 3. Ed Sharp of the University of Utah, where Westnet's IBM NSS is being installed, has signed the IBM site agreement, under protest. We do not believe that we should be required to maintain confidentiality regarding the details of the IBM NSS when there are issues such as performance, robustness, error recovery, etc. That we should all be openly discussing. Such a requirement from IBM is anti-intellectual and could probably be counterproductive in the long run. Ed decided to sign the agreement anyway, as getting a company as large and convoluted as IBM to change such a policy would probably have meant an extended delay for the installation of the IBM NSS. We were also disturbed that IBM was going to delay the installation of the NSS "until the agreement was executed." I have never before heard of an item of equipment being held "hostage." If any of you have similar feelings, let us know. 4. Westnet had good attendance at the BBN Workshop on Domain Name Service. This was a particularly timely and valuable workshop for us. by Pat Burns (pburns%csugreen.bitnet@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU) Westine [Page 19]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 TASK FORCE REPORTS ------------------ APPLICATIONS -- USER INTERFACE No report received. AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS The ANTF is in the midst of scheduling a meeting or teleconference for late June or early July. The agenda will be a discussion of internet accounting and security mechanisms as a follow up to a FRICC workshop planned for mid-June. Deborah Estrin (Estrin@OBERON.USC.EDU) END-TO-END SERVICES The task force met April 12-13 at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View. The most interesting items discussed included: BSD Networking Code The BSD networking code, newly freed from distribution restrictions, has been officially announced by Mike Karels. This code implements the TCP performance improvements that Van Jacobson and Mike have developed. All vendors whose products are based on 4.2/4.3BSD are urged to obtain this code and install it. Bill Nowicki announced that Sun OS/4.0 includes the Van Jacobson performance improvements. IP Multicasting Steve Deering has made a significant revision (simplification) of the IGMP protocol for IP multicasting. The meeting approved a draft RFC describing the new version, and intends to push for its adoption as an Internet standard. Eric Cooper reported that IP multicasting is being used in a file server system at CMU. Steve presented a draft of an inter-multicast-router protocol. This will be issued as RFC-1054. Steve has updated his modification to the 4.3BSD IP layer to support the latest multicasting spec. Unfortunately, we were unable to get this code included in the Berkeley release discussed above; Van hopes instead to include the multicasting code in an update release during summer 1988. Westine [Page 20]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 After a regrettable hiatus, BBN is again funded to work on IP multicasting. Plans include multicast-router support in Butterfly gateways and in 4.3BSD. Transaction Transport Protocol The VMTP specification has been published as RFC-1045, but has generated very little comment. Dave Cheriton announced work on revising the BSD version of VMTP, and a joint effort Stanford/Sun effort to port VMTP into Sun/OS. There was extensive discussion of the performance implications of a wide-spread use of VMTP, which uses rate- based flow control rather than windows. Van expressed a fear that rate-based flow control will be unstable until we learn out how to stabilize it, and that this is a very hard problem. Dave Cheriton presented a proposed solution to this problem, and the flames licked the ceiling. This appears to be one of the most important open theoretical issues in transport protocols at this time. A New Approach Dave Cheriton presented a paper on the deliberate (but controlled) use of recursion in communication protocols. His provocative and stimulating thesis was that it is possible to unify and organize all the protocol layers in an entirely new manner. It would sure put a torpedo through the ISO hull! Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) INTERNET ARCHITECTURE Activity was low this month. The next meeting is to be called after the dust settles from Barry Leiner's meeting at RIACS in late June. Dave Mills (Mills@HUEY.UDEL.EDU) Westine [Page 21]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 INTERNET ENGINEERING Proceedings of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) currently available from the DDN Network Information Center (NIC) are: Jul 1987 (MITRE), NIC document number = IETF-87/3P Nov 1987 (NCAR), NIC document number = IETF-87/4P COST: Each copy is $25.00 (US and Canada) or $30.00 (overseas). HOW TO ORDER: To place an order for a set of proceedings, send a check, money order, or purchase order in US dollars, made payable to SRI International. Orders should be sent to the DDN Network Information Center at the address below. California residents (except military) must include 6.5% sales tax. Please remember to include with your order: your full name; the name of your organization or company; your business address; your telephone number; your email address, if available; and the name or document number of the proceedings being ordered. SRI International DDN Network Information Center 333 Ravenswood Avenue Room EJ 291 Menlo Park, CA 94025 FOR MORE INFORMATION: Phone 1-800-235-3155, or 415-859-3695, and ask for Carol Ward or send electronic mail to NIC@SRI-NIC.ARPA Mary Stahl (Stahl@SRI-NIC.ARPA) INTERNET MANAGEMENT No report received. Westine [Page 22]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 PRIVACY During April, minutes from the March IAB Privacy Task Force meeting were distributed to the task force membership and to USC folk intending to pursue privacy-enhanced electronic mail implementation activities. The next privacy task force meeting is scheduled for Wednesday-Thursday, 15-16 June 1988 at DEC, Littleton, MA. John Linn (Linn@CCY.BBN.COM) ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY No report received. SCIENTIFIC REQUIREMENTS A rapid-prototyping user-oriented set of testbeds is being conducted by 15 universities under subcontract to the Universities Space Research Association, in turn under contract to NASA Office of Space Science and Applications. The purpose of these testbeds is to investigate the use of advanced technologies to support telescience, and to identify the requirements for the information systems of the Space Station era. The program is well under way, and a major meeting was held at the University of Colorado in early March. Details on the program and status can be obtained from RIACS (Maria@riacs.edu). Plans are being formulated for a Task Force meeting this summer. The intent is to finalize three pending white papers and identify what items we should take up next. Barry Leiner (Leiner@RIACS.EDU) No report received. TACTICAL INTERNET No report received. Westine [Page 23]  Internet Monthly Report April 1988 TESTING AND EVALUATION No report received.