[IMR] IMR89-04.TXT APRIL 1989 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). TABLE OF CONTENTS IAB Task Forces APPLICATIONS - USER INTERFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3 AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5 END-TO-END SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5 INTERNET ARCHITECTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5 INTERNET ENGINEEERING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5 INTERNET MANAGEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7 PRIVACY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7 SCIENTIFIC REQUIREMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8 DSAB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8 Westine [Page 1]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 Internet Projects BARRNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8 BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8 CERFNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 11 CICNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 12 CORNELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 13 ISI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 13 JVNCNET, NORTH EAST RESEARCH REGIONAL NETWORK . . . . . . page 15 LOS NETTOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 16 MERIT/UMNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 17 MIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 17 MITRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 17 MRNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 18 NCAR/USAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 19 NORTHWESTNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 19 NSFNET BACKBONE (Merit) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 19 NTA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 21 NYSERNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 21 OARNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 21 PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 21 SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22 SESQUINET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22 SRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23 SURANET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23 UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC., NNSC . . . . . . . . page 23 UCL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23 UDEL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN/NCSANET . . . page 25 WESTNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 25 Westine [Page 2]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 IAB TASK FORCE REPORTS ---------------------- APPLICATIONS -- USER INTERFACE The task force met February 7-8 at SRI International. Principal topics of discussion included telco futures, real-time teleconferencing (principally, BBN's latest version of MMConf and HP Lab's tV), and nation-wide inter-organizational multi-media testbeds. Specifically: - It is widely believed that the regional Bell operating companies are hesitant to deploy ISDN, and would prefer to place their bets on B-ISDN. Doing so would certainly reduce their long-term costs (one deployment versus two). Some might suggest such a tactic would also let them avoid significant embarassment over the current state of ISDN (e.g., there is still no standard for placing calls outside an ISDN switch). In the near term, however, significant opportunities for experimentation--with a widespread, medium-speed network--could be lost. - MMConf now offers much the same functionality as "shared window systems" in that it supports existing applications. At the same time, facilities are provided that support the development of "conference aware" applications. On the down side, MMConf still runs only under SunWindows and it suffers from all the well-known problems intrinsic to a replicated architecture. However, given the potential performance benefits of the replicated architecture, BBN and Olivetti Research Center are continuing to plug away at those problems. - Lester Ludwig (Bellcore), with assistance of several task force members, has been promoting the creation of a wide-area broadband network for experimentation in multi-media communications and computer-supported cooperative work. Each of the contributors to this effort believes it is critical to their own research program to evaluate their technologies in a wide-area, inter-organizational setting. Since no single participant is currently capable of putting together such a network, the proposed testbed is itself a collaborative venture. The proposal has already attracted significant attention, including endorsement "in spirit" by the National Science Foundation. It is currently under review by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives for consideration under their research program in high-speed networking. The Task Force has recently formed a working group, chaired by Lester Ludwig, to coordinate further development of such a testbed. Further details will be provided in the next Monthly Report. Westine [Page 3]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 - A working group on "connection architecture" has also been formed, chaired by Dan Swinehart (Xerox PARC). Its purpose is "to define an architecture that captures, at a sufficiently high level, the notions of voice [and video] connections and of the services that use them." Further details will be provided in the next Monthly Report. Other selected items of interest: - Xerox currently has a software implementation of a DES-like encryption algorithm running at 8 Mbits/sec on a Sun-4. It includes a 1-way hash to cope with viral infections, etc. - The NeWS Development Environment (NDE) is supposed to be included in the System V Release 4 distribution. - The newly-formed Entry Systems Division of Sun intends to emphasize wide-area networking. - Chris Schmandt (MIT Media Lab) is researching the use of speech synthesis and recognition as the interface to window managers, as well as "object-oriented cut and paste" (e.g., pasting an e-mail message into a rolodex tool should result in the computer placing a phone call to the sender of the message). The next meeting of the full task force will take place June 13-15 at Bellcore, Red Bank, NJ. AUDIO SERVER WORKING GROUP The Audio Server Working Group held a teleconference on March 22 between SRI and BBN. After much debate, it was decided to adopt the new Natural Micro Systems VBX voice board for the next version of VOX. A copy of said board has subsequently arrived at Olivetti Research Center (ORC) and work is underway to integrate it into the VOX environment. This selection does not, however, preclude the use of other voice boards in the future; indeed, there was general agreement that multiple boards must be supported in the long term. The ORC implementation of VOX is moving to the Mach operating system platform. Eventually, ORC intends to take advantage of Mach-specific features, including IPC and threads. However, in the short term none of the these features will be used, such that VOX will run in a standard BSD 4.3 system. This will expedite collaboration with other organizations, including Sun and MIT. As ORC migrates to using Mach-specific features every attempt will be made to provide a "bi-lingual" interface such that VOX continue to support BSD clients. Westine [Page 4]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 Finally, efforts continue to make VOX available with as few restrictions as possible. The current tack is to create a VOX Consortium along the lines of the MIT X Consortium. Keith Lantz (LANTZ@ORC.OLIVETTI.COM) AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS No internet related progress to report. Deborah Estrin (Estrin@OBERON.USC.EDU) END-TO-END SERVICES No internet related progress to report. Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) INTERNET ARCHITECTURE About 45 requests have been received to attend the Workshop on the Future of the Internet System Architecture and TCP/IP Protocols, to be held 1-2 June 1989 at the University of Delaware. Local arrangements are under way and travel information has been distributed. Arrangements are being made to publish worthy output from the workshop in an early issue of the ACM Computer Communication Review. If there are still more souls that have not been reached and would like to attend, please send request to: Dian Harper Electrical Engineering Department University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 (302) 451-2406 harper@udel.edu Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) INTERNET ENGINEERING 1) The IETF met April 11-14, 1989 at Cocoa Beach Florida. The meeting was hosted by Kennedy Space Center. The 3.5 day meeting followed the new format of Working Group (WG) meetings on the first two days, technical briefings on the third day, and WG reports on the concluding half day. Sixteen Working Groups met and reported. The preliminary Westine [Page 5]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 agenda was distributed in last month's report. The actual agenda, after some real-time agenda bashing, is given below. 2) There are now 22 Working Groups. Four new WGs met for the first time in Cocoa Beach. They are Dynamic Configuration, Network Management Alert Management, Network Management Services Interface, and NOC Tools. After Cocoa Beach, the Network Information Services Infrastructure WG formed as a subgroup of the User Services WG. For more a statement of charter or other information on these WGs, send a request to ietf-request@isi.edu. 3) The agenda for the April IETF was: Tuesday, April 11th, and Wednesday, April 12th - Working Group meetings Thursday, April 13th - Presentation of the Saxaphone (Paul Love, SDSC) - Detailed report on OSPFIGP (Moy, Proteon) - The Open Routing Architecture (Lepp, BBN) - Report on the NASA Science Internet (Medin, Ames) - Report on the DOE Energy Science Network (ESNET) (Hain, LBL) - Internet Report (Opalka, BBN) - Growth of the Internet (St. Johns, B600) - NSFNET Report o Architectural Changes to NSFNET (Gerich, MERIT) o NSFNET Stats for NSFnet, using NNStat (Gerich, MERIT) - An Interim Routing Architecture (Mundy, DCA B600 for Guy Almes, Rice) - An Interim Routing Architecture: An Alternative View (Rekhter, IBM) - Arpanet Evaporation Timetable (P.Gross, NRI) - Mailbridge Access Control (Lepp, BBN) - Authentication WG Report (Schiller, MIT) - Cornell Worm Report Commentary (Schiller, MIT) - The DCA TCP/IP Certification Program (M. Gross, DCA- DCEC) - IP Header Compression (Van Jacobson, LBL) Friday, April 14th - Working Group Reports Westine [Page 6]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 4) The Proceedings will be mailed out in mid-May. All attendees at Cocoa Beach will be mailed a copy. Additional copies can be purchased at the cost of reproduction and handling from NRI ($35, contact Karen Bowers, bowers@sccgate.scc.com, 703-620-8990). Phill Gross, IETF Chair Corporation for National Research Initiatives INTERNET MANAGEMENT As chairman of the Internet Management Task Force, I presented an IAB recommendation to the DoD Protocol Standards Steering Group. It was recommended that a memorandum from the PSSG or from the Director, DCA, be sent to all DoD procurement authorities stating that references to the TCP/IP MIL-STDs be accompanied by references to matching RFCs. One way to do this is by referencing or copying the OFFICIAL PROTOCOL LIST RFC (i.e., 1100). The PSSG has confirmed it will prepare such a memorandum. Along with Dave Mills, I will represent the IAB at a RARE (European Association of Research Networks) meeting in Trieste, Italy, May 8-10. I will present an overview of the IAB and its Task Forces. An article on this subject will appear in a later issue of Computer Networks and ISDN. Vint Cerf (Cerf@A.ISI.EDU) PRIVACY The activities this month included continued work on the RFC for Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part II Certificate-Based Key Management and RFC 1040, Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I: Message Encipherment and Authentication Procedures. These will be distributed shortly. A one-day workshop to discuss standards for a "commercial version" of the IP Security Option (IPSO) will be held on October 6, in conjunction with Interop '89 in Santa Clara. Participation in the workshop is on an invitation only basis, in order to ensure that the participants will all be contributors to the process, not just interested attendees. All participants are preparing a brief presentation and an accompanying position paper expressing their thoughts on what an IPSO for the commercial environment should encompass. Presentations will address topics such as requirements, functionality, processing Westine [Page 7]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 conventions, formats, etc., though not all topics need be addressed in any one presentation. The next Privacy Task Force meeting will be held on 23-25 May 1989 at University College London, England. Lyndalee Korn has been appointed as the new TF secretary. Correspondence should be addressed to lkorn@BBN.COM. Lyndalee Korn (lkorn@BBN.COM ) SCIENTIFIC REQUIREMENTS No report received. DSAB ---- Nothing new to report this month. Charlotte Tubis (Tubis@Purdue.Edu) INTERNET PROJECTS ----------------- BARRNET ------- No report received. BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC. ---------------------------- WIDEBAND NETWORK April saw a great deal of activity associated with the reconfiguration of the Wideband Network from a satellite-based to a terrestrial fiber-based transmission medium. The transition effort is described elsewhere in this report. Throughout the month the six remaining Wideband Satellite Network nodes (ISI, Lincoln Laboratory, DCEC, SRI, RADC, and BBN) continued to exhibit stable behavior and continued to support multimedia conferences and ARPANET long-haul inter-PSN connectivity. Both of these current Wideband applications will be moved to National Network Testbed (NNT) terrestrial fiber facilities, and access to the Wideband satellite channel will be terminated, in the near future. Westine [Page 8]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 TERRESTRIAL WIDEBAND NETWORK This month, we began the transition of the Wideband Network to terrestrial links. We will be continuing to install Wideband Packet Switches (WPSs) as power at the POPs and tail circuits between the backbone and the gateways become available. After having previously burned in the software and hardware in a testbed, we are currently going through shaking down the systems for any problems that might only show up in the real network. The first two WPSs were installed at BBN and the Washington POP. Later, a third WPS was connected at the LA POP. The IP gateways at BBN, DARPA and ISI were switched to the new network as soon as each local WPS was in place. The ST gateways at these sites were not switched over until all the local WPSs were installed. This was so that we could move the three ST gateways at the same time and thus minimize disruption of ongoing conferencing work. At this point, the only ST gateway left on the satellite-based Wideband is at SRI. A successful demo of the terrestrial Wideband was held at DARPA on 4/20. BBN demonstrated the effect of the higher throughput of the new network on the performance of SLATE (multimedia communications software). This was done by comparing the performance of some new conferencing tools over the terrestrial Wideband between DARPA and BBN and over the ARPANET between DARPA and RADC. Future installation work will include: RADC, Ft. Monmouth (NY WPS) -- Next month, we plan to install a WPS at the NY POP and transition the Wideband gateway at RADC to the new network. The site at Ft. Monmouth will be connected to this WPS as soon as the tail circuit is available. We have been told that the on-site wiring could take approximately 60-90 days. SRI, Stanford (SRI WPS) -- Until the ARPANET IST trunks are moved off of the Wideband to the new T500 backbone (or until the Wideband satellite channel is turned off), the ISI and SRI BSATs will not be freed up for use as the SRI and CMU WPSs in the new network. For use as WPSs, both machines will need to be upgraded and cabled to CSU/DSU equipment, fail safe box, etc. As soon as the BSAT hardware becomes available, we will do the installation work to connect SRI (WPS, IP and ST gateways) and Stanford (IP gateway) to the new network. CMU (Pittsburgh WPS) -- We have been informed that work on power and wiring at the POP was begun on 4/28. We will have to wait for the SRI/ISI BSAT hardware in order to build a WPS for the Pittsburgh POP. On campus wiring for CMU is scheduled for early Westine [Page 9]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 June. SATNET During April, SATNET performance continued to be excellent. Statistics collected by ISI showed an average of 99+% uptime for the remaining SIMPs -- Fucino, Italy and Roaring Creek, USA. There were a couple of outages of the CNUCE gateway. In both cases, before we were able to reach the site contacts, the gateway came back up. Our most recent information indicates that the Italian half of the point-to-point link between CNUCE, Italy and DARPA, U.S. should be installed in mid-May. We expect the US half of the link to be ready before this. Once the point-to-point link is in place, the DARPA and CNUCE gateways will be switched from the SATNET to the new link. As soon as end to end testing is done and the overall path is operational, the SIMPs will be retired. Steve Blumenthal attended the ICB Infrastructure and Open ICB Meetings at RSRE on 4/13. INTERNET R&D The Butterfly version of the VAN Gateway was installed. We are currently doing beta testing with the VAN users. We also wrote a note that was distributed to the ICB on recommendations for using the VAN gateway as a backup path in the event of other communication failures. We are preparing to ship and install three Butterfly Gateways for SURAN sites. These will be installed at SRI (1) and Ft. Monmouth (2) in late May / early June. We installed new gateway software (Release 4.1) in the gateways (ARPA-WB, ISI-WB, BBN-WB) associated with the new Terrestrial Wideband Network and that were used in the demo on 4/20. Over the next month or so we will be updating the software in the other Wideband sites as they transition to the new network. Mike Brescia and Bob Hinden attended the ICB Infrastructure and Open ICB Meetings at RSRE on 4/13. Bob Hinden (Hinden@BBN.COM) Westine [Page 10]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 CERFNET ------- Over the past month there has been a great deal of activity as CERFnet embarks upon it's turn-up period. New links were initiated and various meetings and conferences were attended by the CERFnet staff. In addition, plans were initiated for two CERFnet sponsored seminars, one on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the other on network security, tentatively scheduled to be held this summer. The installation of the CERFnet backbone has been rescheduled for the first week of May. The University of California at Irvine, part of that backbone, will be one of the first sites to be brought up. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), also a backbone site, will be brought up the following week. Shortly thereafter, the University of California at Los Angeles will follow as the last of the backbone sites to be brought up. Installations for the remaining sites will commence the last week of May, assuming all goes well with the installation of the backbone. On April 11th, Los Nettos to CERFnet routing was implemented via the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)-SDSC 56 kilobit link. During this process, the SDSC cisco box had to be rebooted due to configuration problems. Restrictions in the cisco software prevented the box from being configured in the desired manner and this resulted in the box having to be rebooted. Los Nettos has agreed to loan CERFnet a port on the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Los Nettos cisco gateway. The port was used to turn-up a connection to Hughes Aircraft Company on April 27. Hughes' ARPAnet connection was scheduled to be disconnected on May 1. In addition, cisco Systems is providing a loaner gateway to be used at the Hughes end of the link until the CERFnet hardware is delivered in May. The Research Institute of Scripps Clinic has decided to accept an Associate Membership with CERFnet in lieu of their proposed Regular Membership. Scripps intends to use their SDSC provided telecommunications equipment to access CERFnet and will upgrade those facilities to T1 in the near future. The Claremont Colleges; Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and Claremont Men's, will be provided with a 56 kilobit CERFnet link to Caltech. They are tentatively scheduled to be brought on line during August, 1989. We look forward to the participation of the Claremont Colleges. Westine [Page 11]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 Through Custom Product Design, an Associate Member of CERFnet, CERFnet has arranged for a one day seminar on network security, to be held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on August 25th. Russel Brand of Lawrence Laboratories is scheduled to present the seminar. Also, a seminar in SNMP is currently being planned for some time this summer. Distribution of the April-May CERFnet newsletter, called CERFnet News, will commence on May 1st. by Karen Armstrong (armstrong@sds.sdsc.edu) CICNET ------- CICNet has been fully operational since March 3, 1989 and has experienced no major outages. Currently, Merit is testing the options for running DECnet traffic over CICNet. The major advantage of providing DECnet capabilities is that DECnet schools can make use of the T1 bandwidth of CICNet to exchange information. Merit is in the first phase of testing these capabilities. DECnet has been enabled to run concurrently with IP on the cisco routers located at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. This testing is intended to ensure that DECnet routing information is being exchanged properly between routers and to assess the impact of DECnet on router performance. In the next phase of testing, DECnet traffic will be routed from a MicroVAX located at the University of Michigan (not yet in place) to a VAX at Michigan State University. Once these machines are in place, Merit can determine if DECnet traffic significantly impacts the performance of the already operational IP network. Now that implementation is complete, CICNet is concentrating on building an active user support organization. Each CICNet campus has technical and network information support services. Merit is contracted to provide support services to these campus resources. Operations support is provided by the Merit Network Operations Center (NOC). Cathy Aronson, of Merit Internet Engineering, will provide technical support to campus sites. As of May 1, Dana Sitzler, of Merit Information Services, will provide network information support. Meetings are planned for May and June to address technical and information support issues. by Dana Sitzler (Dana_Sitzler@um.cc.umich.edu) Westine [Page 12]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 CORNELL ------- No report received. ISI --- INTERNET CONCEPTS PROJECT A plan for evaluating the IP/SQ congestion control scheme was decided. This involves producing a modified Unix IP in a select group of SUN workstations resident on an ISI LAN. After that, local gateways will be altered to produce Source Quench messages whenever a gateway queue overflow occurs. Subsequently, a series of data transfer tests will be run from the modified SUNs, through the altered gateways to receiving hosts. Statistics will be gathered and the results compared with simulation data to determine whether or not the congestion control algorithm works as well in vivo as in simulation. The first portion of this plan, to produce a modified SUN kernel, is now being undertaken. Greg Finn (Finn@ISI.EDU) Bob Braden attended a one-day IAB teleconference using MCI facilities in San Francisco and Washington, DC. He helped Danny Cohen with the preparation of a discussion paper for DARPA on policy based routing, and produced a new draft of the Host Requirements RFC. Major areas of current work on the Host Requirements RFC include FTP Restart, link level encapsualation on Ethernets, a set of SMTP addressing issues, and multihoming. Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) Joyce Reynolds attended the IETF meetings in Cocoa Beach, Florida, April 10th - April 14th. Four RFCs were published this month. RFC 1097: Miller, B., "TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE Option", CMU-NetDev, April 1989. RFC 1098: Case, J., (UTENN), M. Fedor, (NYSERNET), M. Schoffstall, (Rensselaer), C. Davin, (MIT),"A Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)", April 1989. RFC 1100: Internet Activities Board, "IAB OFFICIAL PROTOCOL STANDARDS", April 1989. Westine [Page 13]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 RFC 1101: Mockapatris, P., "DNS Encoding of Network Names and Other Types", ISI, April 1989. Ann Westine (Westine.ISI.EDU) MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING PROJECT We have made the transition from satellite to terrestrial Wideband Net, and we aren't looking back. Packet voice and video have been transmitted over the new net, but teleconferencing service is not available yet because there is still some shakedown to complete. Before the transition, we brought up packet video connections between the ISI and DARPA sites using Widcom codecs. Since the Widcom is less tolerant of lost data than the Image30 codec, the packet order-restoration algorithm in the Packet Video Host (PVP) had to be enhanced to handle ST packets four packet positions late. and sometimes six positions late. This algorithm was also made more robust to tolerate arrival of duplicate packets that were produced by a now-fixed bug in the terrestrial Wideband Net. So far we have tested the Image30 codec over the new net; next we will test with Widcoms and possibly other new codecs. The multimedia conferencing control software (MMCC) continues its migration from SunView to the Diamond Toolkit. This month, MMCC's video control functions were converted to run under the toolkit. Annette DeSchon continued work on a Multiple-host Background File Transfer Tool, the "mbftptool". This tool runs in the SunView window environment, on Sun workstations, and will be used to support the transfer of documents to various sites participating in a multimedia conference. Steve attended the IETF meeting in Cocoa Beach. Eve Schooler, Steve Casner, Dave Walden, Annette DeSchon (schooler@ISI.EDU, casner@ISI.EDU,djwalden@ISI.EDU, deschon@ISI.EDU) FAST PARTS Alan Katz continued work on a proposed Internet Remote Execution Protocol called T.REX. Alan finished a rough draft of the protocol. Also, Alan continued working with X11R3 and is starting to learn C++ and how to use the Interviews X toolkit (which is written in C++). Alan Katz (Katz@ISI.EDU) Westine [Page 14]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 JVNCNET, NORTH EAST RESEARCH REGIONAL NETWORK --------------------------------------------- The major events of the month can be summarized as (i) record traffic volume, (ii) JvNCnet Phase II starts to provide service, (iv) International Connections, (vi) new JvNCnet members welcomed. The overall up-time for the network this month was 98.12% (higher than last month). The "estimated" amount of traffic in and out of the JvNCnet system for this month was 1,093,752,716 packets. This traffic is a very significant increase from last month (947,074,662 packets). The traffic coming from the NSFnet was approximately 26.44% (a percentage decrease from last month), the traffic coming from the ARPANET amounted to approximately 7.54% (similar percentage than last month), the traffic from NORDUnet was 2.07% (a similar percentage than last month), traffic from JANET amounted to 0.72% of the total traffic. The traffic on the JvNCnet Regional Network this month corresponded to 63.23% of the total traffic (larger than last month). The JvNCnet II network backbone node in Newark, NJ, and its connections to Rutgers U., NJIT, Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey has been performing well. All the routers for the backbone nodes in: Boston, Philadelphia, Trenton, New York City, Stamford and Providence arrived and are undergoing testing before being deployed in the field. The connection to the Joint Academic Network (JANET), is fully operational since the 25th of April. Bell Laboratories, and Bell Core have been connected to the JvNCnet network. Both sites are connected "temporarily" at 56kbps to a JvNCnet gateway in Columbia until their T-1 circuits into the Newark JvNC-BNS are operational (some time in June). The JvNC Network Operations Center (JvNCNet NOC) provides support to the JvNCnet network as well as the internal network of the JvNC. The NOC is staffed from 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday. The Computer Operations staff monitor and perform minor trouble shooting tasks between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. and are the backup for the Network Operations Center. Network Staff are on call after hours and during weekends and holidays. The JvNC Network Information Services Center is now staffed, and provides support from 9am to 5pm Mondays to Fridays. Westine [Page 15]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 Phase II backbone topology (under implementation): Providence BNS | | Boston BNS---------------Stanford BNS-----------------NYC BNS | | | | Philadelphia BNS---------Trenton BNS------------------Newark BNS | | JVNC BNS All backbone links are T-1. The campuses connected to the backbone connect at T-1 or 56kbps. For more information contact the NIC at: "JVNCnet- nic@jvnca.csc.org". by Sergio Heker (heker@jvnca.csc.org) LOS NETTOS ---------- CERFnet brought up a 56K link from UCLA to SDSC. This gave Los Nettos NSFNet access. We are using this path as the perfered path for all of the NSFNet advertised networks. This came up at a time when we were having problems with our BBN gateway access. It considerably helped resolve a lot of our routing problems at a most opportune time. Because of the new path for much of our member's traffic we have new routing configuration changes to make. We need to make the routing decision to use NSFNet when it says it can get to the destination otherwise use the Arpanet who also advertises the same routes plus many more. We have received 10 Datatel 3552 units in the last couple of months. Of those, four were D.O.A. unable to successfully pass data at 1.536 Mb/s in a loop configuration. Three others had console port problems. Datatel appears to have a quality control problem! Hughes, a CERFnet member, was attached to a spare Los Nettos port while CERFnet is waiting for equipment to arrive. A used 1822 interface was purchased to allow Los Nettos to directly connect to what is left of the Arpanet. cisco has been very Westine [Page 16]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 supportive of this effort in spite of the fact that we did not purchase the used interface from them. Jon Postel and Walt Prue attended the Calinet meeting at SDSC. A T1 link from BARRnet and CERFnet/Los Nettos is still in the works but delayed. Caltech is now sending all of their traffic over Los Nettos. Walter Prue (Prue@ISI.EDU) MERIT/UMNET ----------- No report received. MIT-LCS ------- Chuck Davin attended IETF meeting of April 11-14, 1989, where he presented partial results of our simulation tests on the effectiveness of random drop as a congestion avoidance/control mechanism. The results show that random drop does not prevent misbehaving connections from taking an unfair share of network resources. More research and simulation tests are now being conducted on various fair queueing algorithms and random drop strategies, to further identify their effectiveness and limitations. Lixia Zhang (Lixia@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU) MITRE Corporation ----------------- We continue to work on three projects relating to Internet congestion control. One project is a set of measurement experiments on the interaction of TCP connections with varied dynamics with the source quench mechanism. Another is an enhancement of last year's work on adaptive random drop congestion avoidance algorithms, which we are experimenting with in a testbed implementation and also a simulation of large-scale scenarios. We are also participating in the NIST OSI-POSIX project. In addition to MITRE's contribution of VTP and the FTP-FTAM bridge, which have been included in ISODE release 5.0, we are using our experimentation capabilities to test and, if necessary, enhance, the congestion control algorithms that that will be included in the Westine [Page 17]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 BSD 4.4 POSIX-OSI stack. This comprises the "congestion- experienced bit" algorithms contributed by DEC to the NIST ISO Implementers Agreements and, in terms of implementation, the lessons learned from the Jacobson-Karels Slow-start TCP. The Internet Engineering Testbed First Phase was received and installed in March. The testbed now includes multiple networks, a multi-gateway "backbone" of flexible topology, and the installed instrumentation of the NETMON and tcptrace tools we developed. We are now coding the libraries that will extend our instrumentation to OSI. Some experiments will take place entirely in our artificial Internet. Others have involved a few last measurements using ARPANET paths. MITRE will be the site of an NSFNET-MILNET mailbridge, and as part of this, the testbed connectivity to NSFNET will be added to our measurement capabilities. Allison Mankin (mankin@gateway.mitre.org) MRNET ----- MRNet continues to provide Internet service to the domestic, albeit somewhat smaller, supercomputer industry; the closing of ETA Systems was the major focus of MRNet this month. Several key MRNet volunteers were adversely affected by the events at CDC and ETA. MRNet hopes they will find employment in the area and continue their contributions to MRNet. ETA's MRNet connection was severed somewhat abruptly. This caused router and mail confusion for several days. Bethel College, which was receiving mail through ETA, is still without Internet mail service. Some ETA employees can again receive mail at ETA, though this is expected to last only a limited time. CDC may be disconnected from MRNet for a few weeks in the near future while their MRNet connection is moved within CDC. The CDC division which provides MRNet service to CDC was eliminated. Nonetheless, CDC is still very interested in remaining an MRNet member. Some progress has been made by the business plan, membership, and, bylaws committees. More progress is required and is planed to be made prior to the MRNet June meeting. by Tim Salo (tjs@msc.umn.edu) Westine [Page 18]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 NCAR/USAN --------- No report received. NORTHWESTNET ------------ At its February meeting, the NWnet Technical Committee recommended that we reengineer our network to reduce maximum delay times by moving from the current mostly-ring to a mostly-tree topology. We instructed our network manager, Boeing Computer Services, to provide cost data for the change, and based on the cost data they provided voted to go ahead with the change at our April meeting. However, BCS has since that time concluded that their network operations staff is not competent to manage a non-redundant network, and hence that the labor cost of such a design would be very high as their engineering staff became involved in routine operations. We are currently negotiating with them to determine if a reasonable compromise design is possible and desirable. by JQ Johnson (jqj@hogg.cc.uoregon.edu> NSFNET BACKBONE (Merit) ----------------------- Merit/NSFNET Internetworking Seminars Following the successful Internetworking Seminar held on April 17 and 18 in Hilton Head, SC, two seminars have been scheduled for this summer. The first will be held in Ann Arbor, MI on June 25 and 26; it will be geared toward members of CICNet, a midwest regional, and representatives from other midwest campuses who are interested in accessing NSFNET through the regional network. The second seminar is scheduled for Denver on July 27 and 28. It is designed for personnel from campuses who are exploring Internet connectivity and for those who need to know about national network resource directions. Topics discussed will include NSFNET connectivity, network operations, internetworking, network information services, the domain naming system, and electronic mail/postmastering. For further questions and to be included in mailings for these conferences please telephone 1-800-66-MERIT or send electronic mail to "nsfnet-info@merit.edu". Development of Network Planning Tools Since becoming operational in July 1988, traffic in the NSFNET backbone has more than tripled. In the ongoing planning for future Westine [Page 19]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 growth, Merit/NSFNET continues to develop tools for observing traffic patterns and usage in order to predict future needs and "tune" the network accordingly. One of the tools under development will produce criteria for configuring the network based on historical and current real-time network data. Some of the input for this tool includes data on traffic patterns, packet length distributions, and link costs. The output will consist of peak/average link utilization, load/delay trends, and optimum topologies along with current and predicted network performance. Ultimately, repeated iterations of this process will yield a set of information from which network parameters can be derived. These criteria will then provide a rationale for timely network adjustments using the Digital Reconfiguration Service (DRS is a product of MCI) and will also be used in planning for the future of NSFNET. Comparison of Traffic Counts ----------------------------------------------------------- March 1989/April 1898 Packets In Packets Out March 745,599,984 755,073,841 April 873,982,071 833,774,556 % increase 17% 10% ----------------------------------------------------------- While packet counts continue to grow, network traffic has leveled off slightly after the dramatic increases of the past two months (30% in March and 23% in February). Network connections also continue to increase and, as of 4/30/89, stand at: ----------------------------------------------------------- Primary routes 516 Secondary routes 268 Tertiary routes 34 ----------------------------------------------------------- During April, network traffic peaked on the 26th, at 36.5 million packets. by Patricia G. Smith (patricia_g._smith@um.cc.umich.edu) Westine [Page 20]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 NTA-RE and NDRE --------------- No report received. NYSERNET -------- No report received. OARNET ------ No report received. PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER ------------------------------- PSC is now providing primary NSFnet to ARPAnet connectivity via psc-gw4. It carries all of the traffic between NSF only networks and ARPA only networks. Psc-gw4 and its 56k link to PSN14 have been very stable and are relatively unstressed. The number of VC's in use has been dropping steadily over the past month. However our connection to the ARPAnet, PSN14, is still seriously congested. Psc-gw4 discards 15-20% of the traffic presented from the NSFnet because PSN14 refuses the traffic. This is the long term average: During prime time it often discards more than it delivers. PSN14 has also had some congestion related down time. Below is a summary of the routing table from psc-gw4. These are the best known routes to the all of the networks connected to the national internet. Since the data was collected from dynamic routing protocols it reflects the actual state of the internet, including outages, rather than the designed quiescent state. Note that MILnet contributes almost half of remaining ARPA networks. The top two of the remaining gateways contribute the next quarter. Total NSF nets: 423 (Including 12 PSC nets) Total nets via Mailbridges (Milnet nets): 159 Total other networks: 186 Listed By Next Hop Gateway: Count Sample net Next Hop Comment 68 128.11 10.3.0.82 BBN-UCC-GW 25 128.139 10.4.0.5 CSNET-PDN-GW 11 128.10 10.0.0.37 PURDUE-BF-GW 10 192.12 10.2.0.9 YALE-GW 9 128.127 10.0.0.77 GW.LCS.MIT.EDU Westine [Page 21]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 7 132.154 10.5.0.51 SRI-GW 7 131.239 10.4.0.6 ????? - Not NIC, Not Domain 5 192.31.44 10.8.0.111 MCL-GW.UNISYS.COM 4 192.16.174 10.1.0.10 LL-VLSI 3 192.47.242 10.7.0.111 3 192.16.206 10.4.0.15 3 192.12.193 10.2.0.25 3 128.16 10.1.0.119 2 192.12.192 10.1.0.20 2 131.131 10.11.0.20 2 129.55 10.2.0.10 2 129.18 10.2.0.14 2 128.96 10.18.0.16 2 128.29 10.4.0.111 2 128.126 10.5.0.96 1 192.5.8 10.0.0.111 1 192.5.48 10.2.0.37 1 192.5.14 10.3.0.7 1 192.5.105 10.0.0.31 1 192.48.105 10.3.0.22 1 192.35.163 10.6.0.37 1 192.31.30 10.5.0.25 1 192.31.230 10.5.0.14 1 130.44 10.6.0.82 1 128.99 10.4.0.121 1 128.237 10.8.0.14 1 128.170 10.0.0.7 1 128.152 10.6.0.121 1 128.147 10.6.0.14 (As of May 1, 1989) by Matt Mathis (mathis@fornax.ece.cmu.edu) SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER ------------------------------ No report received. SESQUINET --------- No report received. Westine [Page 22]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 SRI ---- No report received. SURANET ------- SURAnet continues to increase in the number of sites connected and in the number of networks advertised to the NSFnet. At present there are 59 sites online and 73 networks are being advertised to the NSFnet. The current list of sites and networks can be obtained via anonymous FTP from noc.sura.net, password guest, cd pub. File name is "online". by Jack Hahn (hahn@umd5.umd.edu) UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC., NNSC ---------------------------------------- The NNSC ran a 2-1/2 day conference on Wide-Area Networking for members of NSF's Long Term Ecological Research project, part of the Directorate of Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences. The workshop, which combined lectures and lab sessions, was sponsored by NSF and hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC. Speakers covered general networking topics as well as resources available to researchers on the Internet. Craig Partridge gave a presentation at the Internetworking Seminar run by Merit and Karen Roubicek attended National NET'89 and IETF. by Karen Roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net) UCL ---- RFC 987 (1988): Steve Kille has written an upgrade of RFC 987 to use the X.400(1988) / ISO/IEC 10021 (MOTIS). This specifies a mapping between X.400 and RFC 822 over a number of common RFC 822 based message transport protocols (including SMTP). The forum for discussion is ifip-gtwy@tis.llnl.gov. It is intended that this document will become an RFC in about two months time. We are investigating the representation of Domain Name Scheme and associated information in the OSI Directory (X.500). It is Westine [Page 23]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 proposed to make some small experiments with this. The QUIPU Directory system was distributed with ISODE 5.0. This is believed to be the first implementation of the OSI Directory which supports both the Directory Access Protocol and Directory System Protocol. It has been installed at a number of internet sites (including: NASA; Nysernet; The Wollongon Group; Columbia University), as well as in Europe. An informal pilot is evolving, and participation is encouraged. Peter Kirstein, Jon Crowcroft and Steve Kille attended the ICB Meeting at RSRE, Gt. Malvern John Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK) UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ---------------------- 1. Our swamprunners continue hacking theses and various odd jobs. Jeff Simpson finished his Masters thesis on a formal model and grammar for a policy-based routing protocol. Mike Minnich has several chapters done of his Ph.D. dissertation on rate- controlled flow management. Paul Schragger built a rough-hewn simulator for our proposed gigabit network and obtained some preliminary results. Dave Mills attended an IAB meeting at MCI in Washington, DC. Vint Cerf presented his thoughts on information infrastructure to an enthusiastic mob at a department colloquium. 2. Significant activity occured this month on our proposed wide- area TDMA gigabit network. Prof. Charlie Boncelet worked out a first-cut, collision-free scheduling algorithm. He came up with a cute idea where the scheduler can even divert a burst to an idle trunk to take advantage of a later unoccupied slot. We have secured fiber trunks between the laboratories of the principal investigators, as well as a couple of uVAXen that can be used as experiment platforms. We are investigating candidates for the transceiver and crossbar components. 3. Effort continued on testing the new NTP Version 2 beta implementations for Fuzzball and Unix systems. Louie Mamakos at U Maryland updated the beta release several times. Dennis Fergusen at U Toronto made major improvements in the code, as well as added support for authentication and an interface to the Precision Standard Time WWV receiver. Most of the eleven Fuzzball primary time servers now have between fifty and ninety regular secondary peers. Westine [Page 24]  Internet Monthly Report April 1989 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN/NCSANET -------------------------------------------------- No report received. WESTNET -------- 1. New Mexico Technet is investigating upgrading their 56 kbps circuits to higher speed, probably somewhat less than T-1, but in the hundreds of kbps range. 2. Mike Moravan held a "Subnet Managers Workshop" at Colorado State University on April 25th. The theme of the network was "Think globally, act (network) locally." The intended audience was subnet managers. A copy of the subnet managers "Users' Guide" is available via anonymous FTP from csupwb.colostate.edu. The workshop was very well received by over sixty attendees. 3. The US Geological Service in Golden, Colorado and Boise State University in Boise, Idaho became connected this month. by Pat Burns, (pburns@super.org), Carol Ward, (cward@spot.colorado.edu)