[IMR] IMR87-05.TXT Westine [Page 1]  ~ MAY 1987 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@SH.CS.NET). BBN LABORATORIES AND BBN COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION --------------------------------------------------- ARPANET/MILNET RFC 1005 was released in May. It describes the proposed AHIP-E enhancement to the AHIP (1822) protocol. This will affect every AHIP and HDH host on the MILNET and the ARPANET. Comments are solicited, to the mailbox "ahipe@bbn.com". Westine [Page 1]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 DIAMOND MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS BBN and ISI have started a weekly meeting discussing Multimedia Communications. We are making use of the Wideband Net Video, Voice and MMConf multimedia conferencing facilities to both handle the communication requirements of this distributed meeting as well as to test and evaluate these systems. All of the participants in the meetings have access to Diamond for preparing material to be presented prior to the meetings. We use the Diamond X.400 mail facilities to exchange copies of discussion material in advance. During the conference, Diamond multimedia documents can be displayed and simultaneously edited at both meeting sites. The Wideband Network Packet Video system provides a full motion black and white video image of the other site which is displayed on a television monitor at each site. We are also using a full duplex Packet Voice system for vocal communications. Meeting participants wear lightweight headsets connected to small FM radios that receive the audio from the other site. This facility has been used several times in the past month for a variety of purposes including a meeting of the IAB, an all-day seminar originating at ISI on the occasion of their 15th anniversary, technical discussions over an evolving protocol document, as well as the weekly Multimedia Communications meetings between ISI and BBN. WIDEBAND NETWORK The performance of the Wideband Network sites' satellite channel subsystems has been stable since the network was moved to CONTEL ASC's space segment at the end of April. The move of Wideband earth station monitoring and control to CONTEL ASC's facility in Atlanta, GA was completed during May. A coast-to-coast Internet Activities Board meeting was supported by the Wideband Network and the multimedia conferencing facilities at BBN and ISI on May 7. The system worked flawlessly throughout the entire day-long meeting. Enough BSMI boards have been successfully tested for to complete BSMI deployment to all of the BSATs in the field. BSMI installations were done at ISI, SRI, M/A-COM, and CMU during the month. The final BSMI installations (DCEC, RADC, and Ft. Monmouth) are scheduled for June. Westine [Page 2]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 SATNET The SATNET continued to perform well. There was only one SATNET outage and three minor gateway/line outages. Task force work is continuing on measurements of SATNET performance. GATEWAYS The Gateways continue to be stable. The Internet is now up to about 215 active networks. We are now debugging our implementations of IP reassembly for the Butterfly and LSI-11 gateways. We expect to begun fielding this in the near future. We have begun working on implementing the SURAP protocol to interface the Butterfly Gateway to the SURAN network. We have two LPR's at BBN and plan to set them up as a small test network to test out the gateway SURAP implementation. Bob Hinden ISI --- Internet Concepts Project Ray McFarland from NSA visited ISI on May 6, to give a seminar on advanced research topics in computer security including: expert systems and artificial intelligence, massively parallel systems architectures, tightly coupled distributed systems, and protocl engineering diciplines. Jon Postel attended Network Meetings at NRI, in Washington D. C. May 12-15. Four RFCs were published: RFC 1005: Khanna, A., and A. Mails, "The ARPANET-AHIP-E Host Access Protocol (Enhanced AHIP)". RFC 1006: Rose, M., and D. Cass, "ISO Transport Service on Top of the TCP Version: 3". RFC 1010: Reynolds, J., and J. Postel, "Assigned Numbers". RFC 1011: Reynolds, J., and J. Postel "Official Internet Protocols". Ann Westine (Westine@ISI.EDU) Westine [Page 3]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 Multimedia Conferencing Project The third teleconference meeting of the IAB was held May 7, with six members at ISI and seven at BBN. All the subsystems involved in the voice and video communication demonstrated a significant improvement in reliability as everything worked smoothly for nine hours of continuous operation! In particular this was due to the delivery of planned enhancements in the Wideband Network hardware and software. This meeting was the inaugural use of the new teleconference room at ISI. We hope the availability of this dedicated room will provide more opportunities for others to make use of our teleconference system. Steve Casner (Casner@ISI.EDU) Brian Hung's new program for the IBM-PC AT can now send both bitmap and text media in the Diamond document format. The program is being tested, and Brian has successfully sent multimedia messages containing bitmap and text to Steve Casner and Joyce Reynolds. Currently the text editing facility is very limited. Brian plans to look at ways of adding some text editing capability and also making some changes to the current program to make it more easy to use. Joyce Reynolds has begun active exchanges of Diamond 3.0 Multimedia mail with BBN. Brian Hung and Joyce Reynolds (Hung@ISI.EDU, Reynolds@ISI.EDU) NSFNET Project Bob Braden, with Milo Medin of NASA, visited Vitalink in order to understand in depth the Translan technology, and in particular its routing and O&M facilities. The following week they presented a report on this to a meeting of the NPAG-TC group at NSF, concerned with the future technology for the NSFNET backbone. Bob Braden also attended the first meeting of the Internet network management working group which is forming under Dan Lynch's flag, participated in a one-day IAB teleconferencing meeting, and attended a three-day meeting of the IRI-Engineering task force held at NRI in Reston, VA. Under the NSFNET contract, work continued on finishing RFC985 and on gathering and mapping topology data on NSFNET. We believe that we finally have a map which is correct, although it is already incomplete. Bob Braden Westine [Page 4]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project Alan Katz spent some time investigating NeWS, Sun's Network/exensible Windowing System and Postscript, which is the imaging language upon which it is based. Alan gave an Internet Seminar on NeWS, Postscript, and X-Windows. Alan helped to evaluate Interleaf's new UPS system, especially their equations package. Under this system, one can enter equations in EQN-like format, but can then edit them WYSIWYG style. Alan Katz attended a conference at UCLA on high temperature super conductors May 8. Alan Katz (Katz@ISI.EDU) MIT-LCS ------- We are considering an effort to build an interactive, animated network simulator. We certainly feel the need for such a handy tool ourselves; we also expect it to be useful to the internet community (as Van Jacobson has suggested, everyone working on network protocols seriously should have such a tool at hand). The goal is to make a simple, flexible/extendible simulator. To prompt portability, it will be coded in C, running under Berkeley UNIX 4.x, and using the X window system as the graphic user interface. Here is our current (and very preliminary) thought on the simulator model: each type of network components --network/link, switch, host, connection (sorry, a bad word), and packet-- will be coded as separate modules; each module has a number of parameters that can be specified (e.g. the link has parameters of delay, throughput, transmission error rate, and type [whether it is a point-to-point link or a multi-drop channel]; connections have parameters such as type, data generation pattern and rate). Hooking up a number of switches and hosts by links (using the mouse to draw them on a graphic screen), you can build a network; hooking some connections to hosts, you make data sources and sinks, and then packets can start flow. Each module is replaceable by another one with the same interface. The simulator will make no assumption about either the network or the traffic models; it will try to provide a library of commonly seen models. For example, to model network traffic, we may provide Poisson arrival, bursty or constant rate, etc. models as packet generators, and bimodal or constant or exponential models as packet length distributions. The decision on what model to use and the model validity are the simulator user's consideration. He can code Westine [Page 5]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 his own data generators if none in the library fits. We would like to get a consensus now on what features people would like to see in this simulator, while we are still designing the framework. It is for certain that the simulator will not meet everyone's wish-list, if we want a prototype to run in the next few months, instead of the next few years. But we'd like to hear suggestions/needs/expectations to help our design effort, and, whenever feasible, to add proper hooks so that later on people can easily plug in whatever pieces we do not provide. Lixia Zhang (Lixia@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU) MITRE CORPORATION ----------------- No report received. NTA & NDRE ---------- No report received. ROCKWELL -------- No input to report this month. John Jubin (Jubin@A.ISI.EDU) SRI --- No report received. UCL --- The ISO Developement environment has been adapted to run over X.25. We now have the thin TP0 layer over both TCP and X.25, and so will be in a position to transparently relay ISO applications over a full stack of ASN1, full ISO session and TP0, between PDNs and the internet. We have collated various inputs to the design of a TCP performance measurement and analysis tool. These are being added to existing Westine [Page 6]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 features. Have already investigated a local problem with a particular TCP and slow subnet routers with the tool. We are looking at implementing a loop resolution and load sharing scheme for multiply interconnected LANs using MAC level bridges. Any input on bridge-bridge protocols would be interesting. The problem of host address acquisition and cacheing in bridges when hosts move is being looked at. Jon Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK) UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ---------------------- 1. Development continues on the Dissimilar Gateway Protocol (DGP). Several details of the routing algorithm and data-base management procedures were worked out with Linkabit staff. Design of a developmental prototype for a three-Sunstation network has begun. 2. An elusive bug reported last month in the new software distribution for the fuzzballs has apparently been squashed and the fuzzware installed in all machines at UDEL, Maryland, Michigan and Rice, as well as Linkabit, Ford and the NSFNET Backbone machines. This version more than doubles the available buffer storage (11/73 configurations), improves performance under congested conditions and fixes several minor bugs. 3. A close look at NSFNET Backbone statistics a week after the new fuzzware was installed showed that congestion is much reduced, with the rate of packet loss dropping to less than 0.1 percent at the busiest gateway (PSC), in spite of its current load of about six megapackets per week. 4. Yet a newer fuzzware version is now under test on UDel and Linkabit machines. This version provides more efficient use of buffer space and also removes certain obstacles hindering expansion of the routing tables. 5. Several problems affecting primary/backup routing paths between NSF and DCA swamps were identified, but not yet completely resolved. The hardest to resolve may be inconsistencies in the various copies of the manually distributed data base used by the Unix gated routing daemon. This is a problem in configuration management and control, not a protocol issue. Westine [Page 7]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 6. A severe timewarp occured when an unlikely combination of events disabled access to three out of four primary (WWVB/GOES) radio clocks and one of three secondary (WWV) radio clocks. Certain Internet hosts normally synchronized directly to these clocks and providing time service to other hosts synchronize to each other using the Network Time Protocol (NTP). During the timewarp, which lasted for most of a weekend, the most often used time servers had cranked through four levels of NTP backup and locked on a dinky WWV clock sitting on my desk at home. It is unlikely that the many clockwatchers chiming these servers noticed the warp, unless they were timing flies down to precisions in the order of a few milliseconds. 7. Partly as the result of the timewarp, effort began on a plan for a regularized Internet time service using designated resources and access paths. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) NSF NETWORKING -------------- UCAR/BBN LABS NSF NETWORK SERVICE CENTER (NNSC) The NNSC hosted the second meeting of the NSFNET Federation of Regional Networks on May 11 at BBN. Representatives from several regional networks reported on the status of their networks. The topics that the group discussed included committee activities, funding for the continuation and expansion of the regional/state networks, networking needs of the U.S. research community, and NSFNET's role in the Internet community. The next Federation meeting is scheduled for early September in New York. On May 12, following the Federation meeting, the NNSC conducted a Regional Network Managers' Forum on the topic of running network information and operations center. Representatives from the following organizations gave presentations: NSF, UCAR, NIC, BITNIC, CSNET CIC, NNSC, JVNC, BBNCC. The session concluded with a tour of the BBN Communications Company Network Operations Center. The last of the four RFC's specifying the High-Level Entity Management System (HEMS) is now nearly complete and circulating for comment. In addition, the NNSC has been receiving an increasing number of technical calls asking for assistance tracking local network problems. By Karen Roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net) Westine [Page 8]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 NSFNET BACKBONE SITES CORNELL UNIVERSITY THEORY CENTER Backbone Operations 31,150,000 packets were delivered by the backbone in April, up 47% from March. Thus in April we did better than a megapacket per day, and recent measurements show we are doing about ten megapackets per week (delivered to Ethernets). We are quite concerned about the potential for congestion -- even though the fuzzballs still have plenty of life in them the traffic is increasing even more quickly than we anticipated. As always, more detailed reports are available. New software has been deployed in the fuzzballs which Dave Mills will report on elsewhere. We are seeing a lot of packets being sent into the NSFNET backbone as a last resort, which the backbone just drops. This sort of thing is very bursty. At the moment we are notifying the offending gateway site and asking them to track down the culprits. Automatic quenching of such bursts is being considered. Coordination and Interoperability Issues Gatedaemon The plans for "gated" call for a new release to be available in about 2-3 weeks. This version will have performance enhancements, all known bugs fixed, and a few more options in regards to filtering of routing information. Specifically, the code for the "gated" program was cleaned up and made more consistent. Unnecessary and redundant code was folded into tighter code. This decreased the size (in lines of code) considerably. Also, the coding style in regards to paragraphing and commenting was made consistent throughout the program. Westine [Page 9]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 Enhancements, fixes include: - - Full split horizon is implemented. - - The interface code is much more robust. Changes can be made to interface flags, metrics, even addresses without having to restart gated. Interfaces are checked every 30 seconds for changes. - - PTP links are dealt with more consistently. The kludge in dealing with SLIPnet interfaces has been removed and all PTP's are handled the same way. - - syslog is used throughout to report errors, notices, warnings, etc. - - There is a hold down of 2 minutes for each of the routing protocols. - - RIP now listens to host routes. This is necessary to deal with PTP's more consistently. - - There is now one table for host routes and one table for net routes. The size of the hash table has been increased and the hashing function has been changed to match the Berkeley Kernel. Enhancements planned before the release: - - Filtering on source for routing information. The option will exist to listen to given source addresses for named networks. Example: only listen to information about default from a.b.c.d and a.b.f.a - - Support for SunOS 3.3 and VAX VMS. VAX VMS mods were provided by David L. Kashtan. - - The notion of subnet interfaces will be supported. This will mainly be used to control where subnet information will be supplied by RIP. - - sending gated a signal will cause it to dump all it knows into a file suitable for viewing. Contemplations which may be in next release: - - route history. The last route to the destination network from each qof the supported protocols will be saved. By Scott Brim (swb@devvax.tn.cornell.edu) Westine [Page 10]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN Connections to Argonne National Labs and University of Illinois- Chicago are now in place. UIC has been allocated a net and will be advertised from the Internet first week in June. The ANL connection is a bit tricky since they have a MILNET connection on that same Ethernet. The advertisment will be gated Hello'ing to the UIUC fuzzball thence to PSC gateway. We have converted the hyperchannel frontending the Cray to a subnet of the connected the campus network. Therefore, the Cray is now reachable and usable from the Internet. Currently running (and all that's currently planned) is a CTSS Telnet server, FTP server, and FTP client. As previously stated the Telnet server accepts line mode only. Also, BSD4.3 users should change there echo control character from ^E (which is an execptionally useful monitor escape character to CTSS). Documentation should be available in a month or so. In that time frame we will also register the implementation with ISI. The Vita-Link installation had been expected to be completed by 15 May. We are now expecting completion by 5 June. At that time UIUC will be a hub (similiar to USAN) with Indiana University as its first rim site. University of Chicago will follow this summer. By Ed Krol (krol@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu) JOHN VON NEUMANN SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER EVENTS OF THE MONTH: ROUTING: The "gated" daemon is running and providing us with the tools to interoperate between the JVNC and the NSFNET using the "hello" protocols, JVNC and the Consortium, using the "rip" protocols, and JVNC and the NRAC group, using "egp". We have found certain bugs, that will be fixed by the new realease of the software from Mark Fedor ( Cornell ). Some of the *new* features of the gated program are the use of the "split horizon" and "hold down" techniques, to avoid routing loops. Sergio Heker, participated on the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting at BBN. MONITORING: There is a current effort to finish phase I of the JVNCNET monitoring system, the system will be robust and flexible enough to be used in any network configuration and to provide the network manager of that network with the tools to determine network Westine [Page 11]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 reachability, host reachability, links status, traffic flow, input and output errors. SATELLITE: The TransLAN bridges were crashing very often and after rebooting would come back on line. The problem seemed to be in the software version that we were running. After updating the software they seem to start working much more reliably. So far and for an entire week there have no more crashes. The initial configuration that VITALINK sent us was not right, therefore it took a couple of hours to reconfigure the TransLAN's at JVNC, University of Arizona and University of Colorado. T1 LINES: In general they are very reliable, and they don't constitute any limitation in bandwidth to us. The main limitation is given at this point by the routers that we use that cannot be driven to full T1 rate. We had a problem with the T1 line between JVNC and MIT, the problem was detected to be at the Central Office of the Cambridge phone company. When recognized by them, the problem was fixed. It took a couple of days for this problem to get fixed, in the meantime MIT as well as HARVARD and Brown couldn't get to JVNC or its attached networks. GATEWAYS: JVNCE was put off line, and its line to Penn State University was moved to JVNCB. The reason of the move is to use JVNCE for supercomputer tests. The move was done during regular PM (note that our routers have regular PM every monday morning since they are VAX750s). SUPER, the vax750's gateway to the University of Pennsylvania, was down many times over the month due to disk problems. Of the 18 gateways (not including jvnca), they were available (reachable via JVNCnet lines) 95% of the time. We received many power hits over the month, each one took the entire network down. We recovered in any case in record time. The Ungermann Routers that we are using to connect to the NRAC schools seem to respond well to routing changes (using EGP), as well as to the load that they have to deal with. Currently they are connected with 56k lines, and the traffic on that lines is not too high. Westine [Page 12]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 PSN: The PSN is in place, the CSU/DSU's that connect JVNC'PSN with the ones at the University of Maryland, Harvard University are tested as well as the lines, the line to the University of Colorado hasn't been declared up yet. The ACC board has been installed in JVNCA, and tested. We are now waiting for DCA to come and connect the PSN to our vax. FUZZBALL: The fuzzball's software has been updated by Hans-Werner Braun (U. Michigan/ Merit network). The new software has much more buffer capabilities than the previous version, and will alleviate the existing congestion problem on the NSFNET backbone. LAN: The local Ethernets are very congested, and we are suffering from a very high number of collisions. The traffic patterns seem to be small "telnet" type packets, and a few very large packets (probably ftp's of big files, and/or x-windows traffic) in burts. The problem could be alleviated by adjusting dynamically the MTU's of our interfaces, but we believe our Ethernets are not capable of sustaining this kind of traffic anyway. A tenth of our traffic comes from the NSFNET backbone gateway. This represents about 23% of the NSFNET traffic going to each NSFNET backbone gateway. MEETINGS: We hosted a meeting of the Network Managers of the members of the JVNC Consortium, at JVNC. The meeting's main subject was routers, models of trust and autonomy. Recommendations were made to the JVNC Network Technical Advisory Committee. * The JVNC Consortium is formed by the following institutions: Princeton University, MIT, Harvard, Brown, University of Pennsylvania, Institute of Advanced Studies, Rutgers, Columbia, University of Rochester, NYU and Penn State. ** The NRAC group is formed by: New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Medical and Dental of New Jersey, and Stevens Intitute of Technology. For more information contact "heker@jvnca.csc.org" By Sergio Heker Westine [Page 13]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH AND UNIVERSITY SATELLITE NETWORK PROJECT The Institute for Naval Oceonography (INO) in Mississippi and the Naval Research Lab (NRL)in Maryland will become members of the USAN network in the near future. A Sun 3 has now been installed at NCAR to be used to interface the 128.116 and 128.117 networks to the ARPANET and to provide a gateway to the NCAR Crays. It will also provide a backup gateway between 128.116 and 128.117. We intend to install GATED when it becomes available for Sun OS 3.3. All USAN sites except Miami and Wisconsin have isolated their local networks behind gateways. These two sites should be behind gateways by late summer. Isolating local traffic at USAN sites frees satellite bandwidth used by USAN sites and lessens the load on 128.116, on which about 20% of the traffic is pass-thru (mainly to/from NSFNET). By Don Morris (morris@scdsw1.ucar.edu) PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER During May the PSC Fuzzball had little unscheduled downtime compared to previous months. Line stability has also improved with the new software versions brought up during the month, improving buffering and probably fixing the UDP error conditions. The PSC Fuzzball has remained at or near the top of the traffic throughput list. PSC-GW has continued to serve as the primary ARPANET-NSFNET gateway. On May 22 the number for our backbone ethernet between PSC-Gateway, the Fuzzball and the Proteon Gateway serving our local net changed from a Class C number (192.5.146.x) to a subnet of our Class B number (128.182.1.x). This will help to relieve the tension on the number of nets being advertised to the core. Plans are progressing well for the installation of PSCNET. In early June we expect to have T1 connectivity through Proteon Gateways to the University of Maryland. By David O'Leary PSC Communications SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER On Tuesday, 2 June, we will complete the installation of the SoftwareTools mail system mentioned last month. This will give SDSC a mail gateway between all connected networks; SMTP based plus Westine [Page 14]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 SPAN, HEPNET, BITNET and SDSCNET/MFENET. We have been exercising it for several weeks and all seems in great shape. With this change, mail from SDSCNET will no longer use the NMFECC gateways to the Internet or BITNET. The correct gateways are now @SDSC for BITNET and @SDS.SDSC.EDU for the Internet. The latter reflects the change at SRI-NIC of our offical names. This change took effect on 29 May. Our machines are now registered as follows (Note: our new Nicknames were our previous Offical names): Address Offical Name Nickname(s) 192.12.207.20 luac.sdsc.edu sdsc-luac.arpa 192.12.207.21 a.sdsc.edu sdsc.arpa,sdsc-a.arpa 192.12.207.22 sds.sdsc.edu sdsc-sds.arpa Where a.sdsc.edu is the path to our Cray X-MP/48. Our 56k UC Office of the President line to UCLA to reach IMP #1 is not yet inplace. The delay seems to be due to the placing, by UCOP, of an IDNX node at SDSC. This will integrate our UC system communications directly into the UC system T1 service and eliminate 6 of our 7 current cross campus tail circuits, new ones in the future (such as for the line to IMP #1), and allow for rerouting around bad ports, etc with much greater ease. The IDNX is expected 20 June. This service should also bring a Proteon to Proteon link between SDSC and UCB. Other lines expected during June are: 56k to NSI at NASA/AMES, 56k to the SPAN Router at JPL (replacing an existing 9.6k), 9.6 SPAN line to S-CUBED (a NASA contractor) in San Diego, and, at last, our T1 Microwave link to the Salk Institute in San Diego. This last line will be Proteon to Proteon and support both IP and DECNET traffic. By Paul Love (loveep@sds.sdsc.edu) NSFNET REGIONAL AFFILIATED AND CONSORTIUM NETWORKS BARRNET All of our 6 nodes are "up" and sending packets, although performance problems still plague at least two sites. We had a minor routing crises when a Milnet gateway route got propagated through all RIP-controlled hosts in the network and this caused a collapse in ARPANET access at UCB. Release 7.3 of the Proteon GW software cured this particular problem, but we still need a more generalized "route filtering" algorithm in order to insure better protection from routing table corruption (intentional or accidental). We are continuing our seemingly never ending test of T1 CSU's. It's clear so far that what CSU is best for a leased- Westine [Page 15]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 carrier circuit is not necessarily best for a privately owned microwave system. It also takes a knowledegable technician to understand all the issuses (e.g. which signaling technique is best for your configuration: 1) Alternate Mark Inversion, 2) Binary Eight-bit Zero Suppression, or 3) Zero Byte Time Slot Interchange ? Hint: there's no one right answer). We plan to continue testing and performance analysis during this next month. We still are not sure when BARRNET will get connected to the NSFNET backbone, but many of our users are already looking forward to using this route for access to the supercomputer centers. By Tom Ferrin (tef@cgl.ucsf.edu) JVNCNET (Refer to JVNNSC backbone report) MERIT The initial implementation of the UDP interface to MTS (the Michigan Terminal System), which is the operating system run by several of our major mainframes, was completed this month. Work is progressing on the generalized TCP/UDP module within the network. Progress is being made on a TCP/IP driver for the Interlan board, which will allow TCP/IP-over-Ethernet connections into our Unibus- based Primary Communications Processors (PCPs). Currently our PCPs support only our own internodal protocol over Ethernets, although our Secondary Communications Processors have supported IP over DEQNA-attached Ethernets for some time now. We are continuing to make changes in our implementation of the IP switching function to enhance reliability and congestion control. On the public-relations side, we have made a presentation about TCP/IP within Merit and the implications of that service to the board of directors of MICIS, the Michigan Interuniversity Consortium for Information Sharing; we have had the University of Michigan's Vice-Provost for Information Technology use PC/IP successfully; we have published information in our newsletter about Merit's IP service; and we have reviewed a set of articles on TCP/IP and PC/IP which were published in the University of Michigan's computing newsletter in the first week of June. Subnet routing deficiencies in Proteon gateways have forced us to expedite the Merit ability to tunnel addresses and number ranges through the Merit packet switching nodes. This became necessary because, contrary to the Proteon documentation, their gateways do not support a bit mask for subnets at this time. Proteon has promised to fix this, but this situation is holding us up for some installations on the UMich campus. Using the Merit nodes instead worked nicely; Merit even allows us to associate a specific bit mask for ANY routing entry. Without individual bit masks for Westine [Page 16]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 routing entries the Proteon gateways will still not satisfy all our needs, even after Proteon implements their current plans for subnet improvements. But neither would most of the other available routers. It currently looks as if only Fuzzballs, the BRL Gateway and Merit nodes have the desired subnet flexibility necessary for more complicated routing topologies. Hans-Werner Braun chaired a meeting of the Technical Committee of the NSF Network Program Advisory Group on 12 May 1987. The agenda for this meeting, which was also attended by some people from DARPA and NASA, was to have some general discussions about what technologies are available for higher speed backbones. Hans-Werner Braun also attended Vint Cerf's IRI Engineering Task Force meeting in Virginia on the 13-15 May 1987. By Christine Wendt (Christine_Wendt@um.cc.umich.edu) MIDNET All of our node hardware has arrived and has been tested. A three node network has been configured for test purposes at the Univesity of Nebraska-Lincoln and is currently being stressed. Some of our telephone lines have been installed; all of the lines should be in by mid-June. MIDNET will hold a two and one half day meeting on June 22, 23, and 24 in Lincoln, Nebraska. The meeting will consist of two parallel sessions: technical and general. The technical sessions will basically be how to fly a gateway router and operate a network node. These sessions will be hands-on; all eleven nodes will be connected and running in a large classroom. After the meeting, each institution will take their node gear back to their campus and connect to the MIDNET telephone lines and their campus network. The general sessions will include updates on the various networks in the internet, a tutorial on internet concepts, a supercomputer site update, information on supporting supercomputer and network users, information on MIDNET network support services, campus connection strategies, and miscellaneous consortium business. Questions about the meeting should be addressed to Doug Gale (402/472-5108) at DOUG@UNLCDC3.BITNET, Mark Meyer (402/472-5434) at MARK@UNLCDC3.BITNET, or Martyne Hallgren (402/472-5435) at MARTYNE@UNLCDC3.BITNET. By Doug Gale (doug%unlcdc3.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu) NORTHWESTNET We still have not yet received the NSF grant for NorthWestNet. In the interim, we have sent out an RFP for internetwork routers, connecting the 11 planned network nodes. The participating Westine [Page 17]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 universities are: Montana State University (Bozeman) North Dakota State University (Fargo, for the ND State system) Oregon Graduate Center (Portland) Oregon State University (Corvallis) University of Alaska (Fairbanks) University of Idaho (Moscow) University of Oregon (Eugene) University of Washington (Seattle) Washington State University (Pullman) By Hellmut Golde (Golde%UWACDC.bitnet@WISCVM.WISC.EDU) NYSERNET As of 1 May 1987, NYSERNET has the following topology with 56kbit links and Proteon Gateways. Reachability to NSFNET, ARPANET, MILNET, etc is available to each site. May additions include SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamton and Syracuse University. Clarkson Syracuse--+ | | | Rochester--------Cornell---------RPI---Albany | | | Buffalo | | | | | Binghamton | | | | NYTEL----Columbia------NYU | | | | | NYNEX S&T | BNL CSNET Phonenet cutovers to peer-to-peer INTERNET mail follow 2 to 8 weeks after network connection. T1 cutover for NYU to Columbia and Columbia to Cornell is schedule for July. The root domain server is being tested internally to be released to the NYSERNET community by the end of June. By Marty Schoffstall (schoff@nic.nyser.net) Westine [Page 18]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 SESQUINET As of June 1st, we are up with connections to two campuses: Baylor College of Medicine, and Rice University. At each of these campuses is a cisco gateway. The gateways are connected via a 56-kb/s link. This connection is very recent, so any usage information would be meaningless. During the month of June, we plan to install connections to four additional campuses: Houston Area Research Center Texas A&M University Texas Southern University, and the University of Houston. Negotiations are underway for establishing a direct connection from SesquiNet to a site of the NSFnet backbone. By Guy Almes, (almes@rice.edu) SURANET The following nets are being EGP advertised to the core on SURANET's behalf. 128.61. Georgia Tech 128.109. TUCC 128.150. NSF 128.154. NASA Goddard 128.163. U of Kentucky 128.164. George Washington Univ 128.167. SURANET 128.169. U of Tennessee 128.173. Virginia Tech 192.5.57. Univ of Delaware (udel-cc) 192.5.219. Clemson 192.16.177. Univ of Alabama It is currently expected that the T1 connection between SURANET and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will be installed and working by the middle of June. The 56kb phone line to Florida State University should be tested and operational on or before June 25. Discussions are continuing with several Federal Research Laboratories about establishing connections to SURANET. Westine [Page 19]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 Telecommunication vendors for the Phase II SURAnet sites will be selected and letters of intent issued during the first week in June. Formal contracts will be executed shortly thereafter. By Jack Hahn (hahn%umdc.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu) WESTNET 1. Our award for FY'87 is being processed by NSF. It is not clear whether the funding will be sufficient to cover just the hardware costs for IP Gateways and DSU/CSUs, but we hope so. 2. Our plan is to request cost sharing from Mountain Bell and AT&T for circuit costs between September and the time we receive our FY'88 money from NSF. New Mexico Technet has already agreed to do so within the state of New Mexico. 3. The RFP for IP Gateways is scheduled to be mailed out from CSU's purchasing office on June 4, with responses due July 8, 1987. It is anticipated that a vendor will be selected by July 18, 1987, and that IP Gateways will be delivered by mid August. 4. Colorado Supernet is negotiating with NCAR and JVNC for access to NSFNET. Currently, we are not being allowed access to NSFnet by either site. Dave Wood is negotiating with NCAR and JVNC to establish access. This is particularly critical in that a number of researchers need to Telnet and FTP to sites other than NCAR and JVNC. As the remaining Westnet campuses come upon Westnet, this will become even more critical. By Pat Burns (pburns%csugreen.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu) Westine [Page 20]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 TASK FORCE REPORTS ------------------ APPLICATIONS -- USER INTERFACE No report received. AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS No news to report. Deborah Estrin (Estrin@USC-CSE.USC.EDU) END-TO-END SERVICES No report received. INTERNET ARCHITECTURE The INARC list was quiet this month. There are several issues ripening on the plate; however, suggesting a meeting should be scheduled in the near future. As funding problems seem to have been resolved here, this chairman at least can get back on the airplanes and resume conking other crania on these issues. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) INTERNET ENGINEERING No report received. IRI ENGINEERING This task force held its initial meeting May 13-15 at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (NRI) in Reston, VA. In attendance for all or part of the meeting were Dave Clark/MIT, Milo Medin/NASA, Steve Goldstein/NASA, Mike Corrigan/OSD, Russ Mundy/DCA-DDN, Bob Braden/ISI, Jon Postel/ISI, Phill Gross/Mitre, Hans-Werner Braun/UMICH, Scott Brim/Cornell, Mike St. Johns/DCA, Dennis Perry/DARPA and Vint Cerf/NRI. The primary goal of this task force is to formulate and recommend steps to stretch the utility of the TCP/IP protocol Westine [Page 21]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 suite while new designs are developed for much higher speed communication regimes. Any alterations or additions to the TCP/IP protocol suite that are recommended must maintain backward interoperability with current implementations. The group identified the need to revise the model of the Internet to account for the multiplicity of administrations (DARPA, DOE, NASA, NSF, DCA...), introduction of commercial components (LANs, gateways, protocol implementations...), improved performance, accommodation of more dynamics in the mobile parts of the Internet, renewed attention to security concerns both from the Defense point of view and from the view of inter-organizational networking. A report is in preparation summarizing the results of the meeting and will emerge in the form of an RFC after appropriate review by the task force participants. Vint Cerf (Cerf@A.ISI.EDU) PRIVACY Nothing to report this month. John Linn (Linn@CCY.BBN.COM) ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY Nothing to report this month. Jim Mathis (Mathis@tsca.istc.sri.com) SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING No report received. SECURITY No report received. Westine [Page 22]  Internet Monthly Report May 1987 TACTICAL INTERNET No report received. TESTING AND EVALUATION No report received. Westine [Page 23]