[IMR] IMR90-01.TXT JANUARY 1990 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 INTERNET ACTIVITIES BOARD IAB MESSAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3 INTERNET RESEARCH REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 4 AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 4 END-TO-END SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 4 PRIVACY AND SECURITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5 COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 7 INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 9 Westine [Page 1]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 Internet Projects BARRNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 15 BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 15 CERFNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 16 CICNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 18 CORNELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 18 ISI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 19 JVNCNET, NORTH EAST RESEARCH REGIONAL NETWORK . . . . . . page 21 LOS NETTOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 21 MERIT/UMNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22 MIDNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22 MIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22 MITRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22 MRNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22 NCAR/USAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23 NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK . . . . . . . . page 23 NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . page 23 NORTHWESTNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24 NSFNET BACKBONE, MERIT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24 NTA-RE/NDRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 26 NYSERNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 26 OARNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 26 Pennsylvania Research and Economic Partnership Network . page 26 PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 26 RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 27 SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 28 SESQUINET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 28 SRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 28 SURANET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29 TEXAS HIGHER EDUCATION NETWORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29 UCL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29 UDEL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN/NCSANET . . . page 30 WESTNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 30 Westine [Page 2]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 IAB MESSAGE Internet Activities Board Report The IAB met at ISI on January 3-4, 1989. Two new members joined the board: Lyman Chapin of Data General, and Tony Lauck of Digital Equipment Corporation. The following actions were taken by the IAB at this meeting. A. IGP Policy The following is to be the general policy on intra-AS routing protocols ("IGPs") for the Internet: there will be one primary standard protocol that will be RECOMMENDED, but there may be other standard protocols which will be ELECTIVE. All general-purpose Internet gateways will be expected to support the primary standard; support of any of the other standard protocols will be optional. A primary standard will be selected after the IAB has received recommendations from the IESG. B. Minutes IAB meeting minutes will be published in the future. C. Scientific Requirements Task Force The recent IAB reorganization left this one task force dangling. At the recommendation of the Task Force chairman, Barry Leiner, the task force has been disbanded. However, the IAB hopes that its members will continue to provide extensive input to Internet planning by participation in appropriate IETF working groups. D. Standards Procedures The IETF has made recommendations to the IAB about some detailed changes to the standards procedures, to make clear to all in the Internet community the significance and status of every protocol specification in the "standards track". The IAB has not completed work on this recommendation, but the results will be announced as soon as they are available. Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) Westine [Page 3]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 INTERNET RESEARCH REPORTS ------------------------- AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS ------------------- No report received. END-TO-END SERVICES ------------------- END-TO-END RESEARCH GROUP The End-to-End Research Group met for two days at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on January 17-18. The entire second day was devoted to a joint meeting with the Privacy and Security Working Group; see their report for a summary of this day. The topics discussed during the first day included the following: o MULTICASTING The group discussed the question: what are the primary areas left for research in Internet multicasting (see below). o DATA ENCODING Craig Partridge presented some partial results for performance measurements on various data encodings. It was observed that our machines are increasingly RISC-based with boundary alignment constraints; "bytes are not cheap". A useful effort would be to design a data encoding that would be efficient for RISC CPUs. o ASYMMETRIC ROUTES The group discussed the architectural question: are asymmetric routes (i.e., different routes in the two directions) intrinsically bad? This issue arose out of Dave Clarks RFC on policy-based routing (RFC-1102), which argued for symmetric routes at the inter-AD level. Three arguments have been raised against asymmetric routes: (1) they double the effort for billing and accounting; (2) they cause "wierdness" when things break; and (3) there may be a problem constructing a path for sending control information back to the source from an intermediate gateway. The group decided that, with respect to (3), an architecture that makes it difficult to send an Westine [Page 4]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 error message from the gateway system back to the source is a bad idea. Clark suggested one solution might be to send control or error information forward to the destination and thence back to the source (like the DEC congestion bit). o TCP WINDOW SIZE Revisiting the issue of TCP operation over a "big fat pipe" (see RFC-1072, RFC-1106), we learned that Van Jacobson is thinking of a modification to classical-VJ slow-start and congestion-avoidance, to handle this problem. The RG wants to follow up on this. o HIGH SPEED PROTOCOLS Dave Clark presented his latest strategy for defeating protocol layering. A number of the discussions concerned the general question: what are the research issues? The following issues were identified in the meeting: o Scaling issues for resource location protocols. o Implications for all protocol layers of synchronized clocks. o Scaling of clock synchronization protocols, e.g., NTP. o Best algorithm for multicast routing. o Inter-AD multicast routing algorithms. o Congestion control with multicasting. o Self-organizing set of agents, e.g., NTP agents. o Data encodings efficient for RISC chips. o TCP congestion control over big fat pipes. o Possible phase changes with network growth. Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) PRIVACY AND SECURITY -------------------- The Privacy and Security RG met at Xerox PARC, January 17-19, 1990 including a one-day joint session with the End-to-End RG. Topics of discussion for the January meeting included Privacy- Enhanced Mail implementation status, security requirements for Network Time Protocol (NTP) and for the Transport Layer, and a developing framework RFC on security labelling. Westine [Page 5]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 On the Internet Privacy-Enhanced Mail front, implementation activities have continued at TIS, with work on upgrading to production-level software for message processing and key management in preparation for the beta test phase now expected to begin early spring of this calendar year. The initial beta test community will be the PSRG and IAB members. Discussion of the progress in this area and plans for software in support of certification and registration have been the topics of meetings and workshops held in December 1989, and continuing this month with representatives of BBN, RSADSI and TIS attending. In the course of these workshops, BBN has begun to develop an alternative to the user registration procedure outlined in RFC 1114. The new procedure involves a mechanism by which organizations could directly act as issuers of certificates for their own users with out compromising the integrity of the system as a whole. This would provide faster turnaround than the RFC 1114 registration mechanism which has RSADSI as a co-issuer, and would eliminate the need for RSADSI to retain organizations' private keys. It would also reduce significantly the fee paid to RSADSI for each user certificate. Dave Mills of the End-to-End RG spent some of his time during the January meeting explaining the operation of NTP to the PSRG and outlining security requirements for the protocol. This work will be followed up by Matt Bishop who, with Dave's input, will be editing a white paper on NTP security requirements and a recommendation of mechanisms to address them. The joint E2E/PSRG meeting focused on a list of topics proposed by E2E members on ways of addressing security problems in a variety of end-to-end communications environments. Topics included VMTP, discovery protocols, security implications of multicast, and general questions about providing security at the transport layer. Several examples of current security software and hardware technology were cited, and security protocols SP3 and SP4 of the Secure Data Network System (SDNS) program were cited as possible building-block mechanisms to addressing some of the end-to-end concerns. Work on a profile of SP4 for use in Internet hosts was cited as a possible focus for an IETF WG in the newly formed Security area. PSRG members reviewed a draft outline for framework RFC was presented and some revision to the outline was made. This document summarizes the motivation for the use of security labels at various protocol layers, considers security label requirements in various contexts, and reviews labelling approaches in use today. Westine [Page 6]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 Ongoing work includes additional consultation on NTP security requirements coordinated by Matt Bishop, and further development of the labelling framework RFC edited by Russ Housley. The next PSRG meeting is planned for early April at DEC, in Boxborough, MA. Ken Rossen (kenr@BBN.COM) COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGY ------------------------ The Collaboration Technology Research Group (formerly the Applications / User Interface Task Force) has not been as inactive as our absence from the last several Internet Monthlies might suggest. Indeed, we have had two meetings, June 13-15, 1989, at Bellcore, and October 19-20, 1989, at BBN. Highlights of those meetings and other related events include: - The group has been renamed the Collaboration Technology Research Group. This is to emphasize our application-driven approach to technology; i.e., technology is not an end in itself. At the same time, however, the particular application domain provides some of the best motivations for research in user interfaces and multi-media technologies, so those topics will continue to pervade our discussions. - The evidence is mounting that high-speed network researchers are paying insufficient attention to the issue of multi-channel synchronization (a.k.a. media synchronization). Example applications where multi-channel synchronization is required, include keeping the audio channel in synch with the video channel during a real-time teleconference, or keeping the graphics "channel" in synch with the audio channel when playing a voice segment using a voice editor. In both cases, two different communication channels, with different qualities of service, are clearly correlated and must be synchronized with each other. Unfortunately, there appears to be little ongoing research that is addressing these issues. In particular, the bulk of the research on Asynchronous Transfer Mode has assumed that channels have independent connection request and burst statistics. The ANSA (Cambridge), MUSE (MIT), and IMAL (Bellcore) projects are among the few groups addressing these issues. - Related to this, standards for (asynchronous) exchange of multi-media information also appear to be slow in coming. The group consensus is that neither X.400 nor ODA are adequate, but there is no serious alternative on the table. Low-level efforts Westine [Page 7]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 continue to find a "champion" to host a workshop on this topic. - With respect to real-time teleconferences, experience to date suggests: the more comfortable people are with each other, the better open floor works---because the better/more comfortable people are at employing the necessary non-computer-supported "social" protocols to negotiate floor changes; a preemptive request for the floor (such as might happen with MMConf or Dialogo, for example) should not be granted unless the current floor holder has been inactive for some tunable period of time; and floor control mechanisms are amenable to the same analysis to which data link protocols are subjects---for example, just as CSMA/CD doesn't work over long distances or under heavy load, so too with running open floor. Further experimentation is required, however, to validate the anecdotal evidence available to date. - There is still no shared window system that is (a) readily available, (b) runs on an equally accessible hardware/software base, and (c) is reasonably bulletproof. Olivetti's Dialogo is available on fairly generous licensing terms (including sources), but runs on Mach and suffers some from its replicated architecture. HP's SharedX runs under 4.3 BSD, but includes significant hardware dependencies and is available only on very restrictive licensing terms. MMConf too is 4.3 BSD-compatible, but runs under SunWindows and sources are unavailable. None of these systems works well with heterogeneous display hardware. - The Testbed Working Group continues to negotiate with NSF, DARPA, and NRI vis a vis wide-area testbeds for research in collaboration technology. - The "Voice in Computing" program at BNR's Computing Research Laboratory bears watching by all those interested in desktop audio. They are addressing both workstation architecture and voice processing issues. - MIT continues as a front-runner in applications of video. Glorianna Davenport's group at the Media Lab is developing multi-media databases for video editing and review. In the meantime, at Project Athena, the MUSE project is developing video production tools for courseware. In the process, both groups have developed an excellent sense of user requirements and the underlying service primitives necessary to support those requirements. There are still open issues, but what they already know warrants wider distribution. (BBN Systems and Technologies has also developed some video tools, which although more limited in functionality, can be more easily integrated Westine [Page 8]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 into traditional workstation environments (i.e. without Parallax boards).) - MIT also remains a front-runner in audio, courtesy principally of Chris Schmandt's group, one of whose ongoing efforts has been to "tame" their AT&T #5ESS ISDN switch. The latest advance is to use their Sun-based Phoneserver to provide a better application interface to said switch, specifically, to the Q.931 signaling protocol. Chris's group has also developed a nifty little speech-based interface to X window managers. For example, saying "hide" or "expose" will hide (or expose) the window with the input focus. This is implemented by a combination of hardware and software; the hardware consists of their PC-based audio server and the software consists of an application program that listens for (speech) input and invokes X window management requests. - US West Advanced Technologies has developed one of the better examples of a metropolitan-area broadband testbed in support of distributed groups. Their experiences reinforce the conclusions of prior studies, for example, that audio is both more important (for teleconferencing) and more difficult to get right than video, but that video provides a sense of comfort and enables the use of more social protocols. They also recommend that such networks provide "video automatic number identification (ANI)" and "video busy signals." Our next meeting is scheduled for February 28 - March 2, at Xerox PARC. The principal topic of discussion will be multi- media terminal/workstation architecture. Keith Lantz INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS ---------------------------- IETF REPORT Chairman: Phill Gross/NRI 1. There will be an open meeting of the IESG on Thursday afternoon (Feb 8, 4-7pm) at the February IETF meeting. The agenda will be: o Presentation of New Proposed IAB Standards Process. This will help to set the context for the next two topics. o Review of the standardization status of some current Internet protocols. The IAB is organizing the Internet standards process. Westine [Page 9]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 In conjunction, the IAB has asked the IESG to make recommendations on numerous current Internet protocols. o Review standardization of Intra-AS (i.e., IGP) routing protocols. (See 2. below) 2. There is a strong need for high functionality *open* IGPs for the TCP/IP protocol family. The goal is increased routing functionality and multi-vendor interoperability. Current open IGP's (e.g., RIP) no longer fulfill modern routing requirements. There are now several candidate IGPs being proposed for Internet standardization. The IESG earlier made the following recommendation to the IAB: o One IGP routing protocol should be designated as a RECOMMENDED standard for routers in the Internet. Other routing protocols may be designated as Internet standards but these will be ELECTIVE, not RECOMMENDED. o All Internet routers which implement a dynamic routing protocol will be expected to implement the RECOMMENDED standard IGP routing protocol. o Internet routers may also implement other ELECTIVE Internet standard routing protocols, or proprietary non-Internet- standard routing protocols, as they wish. o Any future proposals for IGPs will be treated equivalently. o Making a decision at this time should not preclude making an orderly evolution in the future, if conditions warrant. The goal will be to collect information on the candidate protocols at the February IETF meeting at FSU. Each candidate protocol will be given the opportunity to brief the IETF plenary. Then the IESG will hold an open session in the plenary to discuss this (and other) issues. Audience participation will be strongly encouraged. The IESG will then forward collected information and a recommendation to the IAB. Westine [Page 10]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 Important criteria for this decision are: o State of protocol development and standardization effort, o technical merit of protocol and component algorithms, o operational experience, o status of product availability (or, expected time-to-market), o OSI integration issues (e.g., fully independent stacks MUST always be supported, but efficiency may arise from converging mulitple protocol functions), o publicly available code (preferably for unix, for inclusion in 4.4bsd), and o provision for Authentication. ******IESG AREA REPORTS****** HOST AND USER SERVICES AREA Director: Craig Partridge/BBN Three new working groups have been created: The Distributed File Systems WG, which is charged with investigating network performance of various file systems and considering if any of the current distributed file systems are appropriate candidates for standardization. The chair is Peter Honeyman. The End-To-End User Connectivity WG, which is charged with developing a plan for how user-reported connectivity problems can be repaired in a timely fashion. The chair is Dan Long. This effort is in cooperation with FARNET. Network Graphics WG, which will look at the network performance of graphics protocols. The chair is TBA. INTERNET SERVICES AREA Director: Noel Chiappa/Consultant, Proteon Report not Received ROUTING AREA Director: Robert Hinden/BBN A new working group was formed called "IS-IS for IP Internets Working Group". It is chaired by Ross Callon. The purpose of the group is to extend the ANSI IS-IS Routing protocol to be Westine [Page 11]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 used for IP. An internet draft titled "Use of OSI IS-IS for Routing in TCP/IP and Dual Internets" was published. A talk is scheduled at the February IETF to present this work. Open Routing Working Group completed their architecture document. It it titled "An Architecture for Inter-Domain Policy Routing". It is being published as an "internet-draft". A presentation is scheduled at the February IETF meeting to present this architecture and a open working group session to review detailed comments. The Interconnectivity Working Group has been split into two groups. IGW will focus on the development the Border Gateway Protocol. A new group called Topology Engineering Working Group has been formed to deal with issues of Internet topology and interconnection. This group will be in the Operation Area. A new working group was formed to develop multicast extensions to OSPF. It is called "Multicast Extensions to OSPF" and is chaired by Steve Deering. I would like to see a new working group formed to develop standards for internet gateways/routers for route filtering techniques. If you are interested in participating in or chairing this group please contact me by email (hinden@bbn.com) or at the IETF meeting. NETWORK MANAGEMENT AREA Director: David Crocker/DEC Report not received. OSI INTEROPERABILITY AREA Director: Ross Callon/DEC and Robert Hagens/UWisc Reported by Robert Hagens/UWisc The OSI Area Directors have two interesting news items to report: PARIS, February 1 - The OSI IS-IS protocol passed muster at the Paris ISO SC6/WG2 meeting: (a) The IS-IS intra-domain routing protocol specification was approved unanimously for registration as a Draft Proposal (DP). Westine [Page 12]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 (b) US delegates were successful in obtaining approval to add the code point 1100 1100 to the ISO standard for identifying Network layer protocols (ISO 9577) to identify the DoD IP. This was also a unanimous decision, with active support from many other national delegations. ISO 9577 can now be used to discriminate among OSI Network layer protocols and the DoD IP when both protocols share a common link layer circuit. - report courtesy of Lyman Chapin. MARINA DEL REY, January 29 - A new Request for Comments has been issued: "An Echo Function for ISO 8473". This memo defines an echo function for the connection-less network layer protocol. Two mechanisms are introduced that may be used to implement the echo function. The first mechanism is recommended as an interim solution for the Internet community. The second mechanism will be progressed to the ANSI X3S3.3 working group for consideration as a work item. When an ISO standard is adopted that provides functionality similar to that described by this memo, then this memo will become obsolete and superceded by the ISO standard. This memo is not intended to compete with an ISO standard. This is a Proposed Elective Standard for the Internet. SECURITY AREA Director: Steve Crocker/TIS A new working group is being formed to consider Internet security policy issues. Rich Pethia, manager of the CERT, will chair the group. It will have its first meeting at the IETF meeting in Florida. IP Authentication No substantial comments have been received since the last IETF. It will be submitted to the RFC Editor immediately following this IETF. SNMP Authentication There are 3 documents: "Authentication and Privacy in the SNMP" "Administration of SNMP Communities" "Experimental Definitions of Managed Objects for Administration of SNMP Communities" Westine [Page 13]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 The first has just been placed in the Internet Drafts directory. The others will be available at this IETF and will be submitted to the drafts directory immediately following this IETF. We expect they will be submitted to the RFC Editor following the next IETF meeting. OPERATIONS AREA Interim Director: Phill Gross/NRI Report not received. APPLICATIONS AREA Director: Russ Hobby/UC-Davis Report not received. Phill Gross (pgross@NRI.RESTON.VA.US) Westine [Page 14]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 INTERNET PROJECTS ----------------- BARRNET ------- No report received. BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC. ---------------------------- INTERNET R&D Throughout the month of January, we have been collecting review comments on the draft of the architecture for inter-domain policy routing. We recently held a video conference with approximately 15 participants, at which we came to agreement about issues outstanding in the document. The architecture draft is slated to become an Internet Draft at the beginning of February. We will present a talk covering the basic features of the architecture at the upcoming IETF meeting. We have also been working on a set of protocols for inter-domain policy routing. A draft version of these protocols will be completed in early March, at which time we will meet with others to discuss them. REAL-TIME MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING This month we made significant improvements to our multimedia talk presentation tool in order to make it easier to create and modify talks. We also improved the way the individual data files that make up a talk are managed and gathered together into a single file. Other activities included participation by Terry Crowley in the Workshop on Architectures for Very-High Speed Networks. Terry talked about applications such as multimedia conferencing and distributed access to video information that would require the resources of very high-speed networks. Some characteristics of these applications include requirements for video with a wide range of compression and quality characteristics, requirements for real- time and non-real-time performance (e.g. video mail), and unpredictable usage patterns (e.g. will conferencing be used for group meetings, one-on-one calls, or as long-standing "tele-ports" to other sites to help create community ties over long distances). Westine [Page 15]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 An interesting concensus that became apparent was the need for testbeds where these applications could be tried out and better information gathered about real traffic patterns. TERRESTRIAL WIDEBAND NETWORK AND ST/IP GATEWAY During January, the Terrestrial Wideband supported five conferences and two conference demos. Three of the conferences involved four sites. Conferences were held by the IETF Working groups on User Documentation, and Open Routing. Bob Braden chaired a 4-site panel on the DRI Open Gateway Testbed. Also, discussions were held between Danny Cohen (ISI) and Ira Richer (DARPA). Work on support of SIMNET over ST continued. Last month, tests were run in the testbed to verify that the system could handle a high traffic load and the anticipated long-haul delays. This month a SIMNET-ST/IP gateway was fielded in the Washington SIMNET office which allowed us to do similar tests over the real network between Washington and BBN. In mid-January, over one megabit of ethernet traffic and traffic from 800 simulated vehicles were successfully passed between SIMNET applications (simulators, traffic generators, and other applications) at each site. Multicast delivery in the SIMNET host also passed preliminary testing in the testbed. Bob Hinden (Hinden@BBN.COM) CERFNET ------- CERFnet continues to expand its membership. During January, the cisco routers throughout the network underwent software upgrades. A portion of the backbone links were upgraded to T1. The DIAL N' CERF (dial-up service) is stepping out into its pilot stage. The CERFnet Network Information Center (NIC) was relocated to another machine and new documents were added to the repository. New members During December, a division of Xerox Corporation located in San Diego had all the necessary hardware installed to connect to CERFnet. Due to delays in receiving their IP address number, their installation was not completed until in mid-January. Xerox has a 56 kilobits-per-second (kbps) link to the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Westine [Page 16]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 Also, during December a backbone node was installed at the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) in Oakland. This is CERFnet's first Northern California site. UCOP has a 56 kbps link to SDSC. Science Applications International Corporation of San Diego had all of their CERFnet hardware installed in December. SAIC is currently working on problems with their local-area network before bringing up their T1 link to SDSC. Three new industrial members will be installed in February. These are Supercomputing Solutions (San Diego, California) on February 6, Quotron Systems Incorporated (Los Angeles, California) on February 13, and Science Horizons (Encinitas, California) on February 20. Supercomputing Solutions and Science Horizons will both have 56 kbps links to SDSC. Quotron Systems Incorporated will have a 56 kbps link to the the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Another new industrial member, ISX Corporation (Los Angeles, California), will be brought online during March. ISX will have a 56 kbps link to UCLA. Walt Disney Imagineeing (Glendale, California) will be brought online during April. They will have a 56 kbps connection to Caltech. Progress with DIAL N' CERF DIAL N' CERF, the CERFnet dial-up service, is currently undergoing in-house testing. The dial-up service currently uses SLIP, and eventually will use Point-to-Point Protocol for Internet access. DIAL N' CERF subscribers will be able to ftp and telnet from their workstations such as PCs and Macs. Mail service will also be available. DIAL N' CERF will be available to the community in Spring . . . just in time for summer. Increased redundancy A T1 circuit between the UCI and UCLA was installed to complete the redundancy of the backbone. The backbone link between SDSC and UCLA was upgraded from 512 kbps to T1. Also, the backbone link between UCOP and SDSC was upgraded from 56 kbps to T1. This makes the CERFnet backbone all T1 circuits. Cisco upgrades to 8.0 Throughout January, the CERFnet cisco routers were upgraded from the 7.1 software version to the new software version 8.0. Among the new elements of this release: support for three new network protocols (Novell IPX, Apollo Domain, OSI); X.25 switching capability; Token Ring local source routing; and enhancements to Westine [Page 17]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 network management and security. Security management in this release has been improved significantly. cisco now supports both the basic and extended IP Security Option (IPSO). Also, cisco has added user-authentication functionality to routers as well as terminal servers. Farnet On January 8 and 9, CERFnet hosted the FARNet quarterley meeting at SDSC. Karen Armstrong (armstrongk@sds.sdsc.edu) CICNET ------- No report received CORNELL ------- A new version of the gated software is now in alpha test. Interesting developments are: BGP implementation conformant with RFC1105. Better configuration parser (using lex and yacc). More flexibility in controlling route acceptance and propagation. It will be possible to control route propagation and even set metrics depending on what protocol and {AS,gateway,interface} the route was learned from. Multiple routes to a given destination (one per protocol for RIP and HELLO, one per gateway for BGP and EGP). The active route is selected by a preference. Preferences can be specified by protocol, interface, gateway or AS. MIB-2 draft SNMP support interfacing with NYSERnet's snmpd. Extensive re-design aimed at both portability and ease of implementation of new protocols. Ability to selectively compile only desired protcols. Enhanced tracing facilities, including EGP and BGP state machine tracing. Westine [Page 18]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 Scott Brim is chairing a new IETF working group, the Topology Engineering Working Group. He has submitted a paper, "IP Routing Between U.S. Government Agency Backbones and Other Networks," as an Internet Draft. We are trying to get money to develop support for routing multicast communications over wide areas, both within an AS and across AS boundaries. Scott Brim (swb@chumley.tn.cornell.edu) ISI --- INTERNET CONCEPTS PROJECT Bob Braden organized what is hoped to be the final teleconference to consider what gateway platform to use for the open gateway testbed, Friday, January 26th. As planning for this testbed proceeds, one difficult problem has been finding a suitable name for the network. The current favorite is Internet Research Architecture Network . . . IRANET. Bob also held a two-day meeting of the End-to-End Research Group at Xerox PARC, January 17-18, 1990 and attended the 2.5 day Gigabits Workshop at BBN, January 24-26 1990 and hosted the 2 day IAB meeting held at ISI 3-4 January 1990. Work on updating statspy was nearly completed. Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) Memo About RFCs in Postscript and Ascii From: postel@ISI.EDU (Jon Postel) Date: Fri, 2 Feb 90 14:37:55 PST Subject: About RFCs in Postscript and Ascii RFCs have been traditionally published in ASCII text. The IAB has decided that RFCs may be published in PostScript. This decision is motivated by the desire to include diagrams, drawings, and such in RFCs. It also allows authors that normally work with document production tools that produce PostScript output to use their normal tools. PostScript documents (on paper, so far) are visually more appealing and have improved readability. Westine [Page 19]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 PostScript was chosen for the fancy form of RFC publication over other possible systems (e.g., impress, interpress, oda) because of the perceived wide spread availability of PostScript capable printers. It has been pointed out that many RFC users read the documents online and use various text oriented tools (e.g., emacs, grep) to search them. Often, brief excerpts from RFCs are included in e-mail. These practices are not yet practical with PostScript files. Therefore, the IAB has also decided that when ever an RFC is published in PostScript a secondary version of that RFC is to be made available in ASCII text. This secondary version may be missing some elements of the primary version (e.g., diagrams), and be formatted differently. Work is in progress to provide the secondary versions of the PostScript RFCs already published. It has also been pointed out that PostScript is less standard that has been assumed and that several of the document production systems that claim to produce PostScript actually produce nonstandard results. It may be necessary to identify a set of document production systems authorized for use in production of PostScript RFCs, based on the reasonableness of the output files they generate. --jon. (The RFC Editor) Two RFC was published this month. RFC 1139: Hagens, R., "IETF-OSI Working Group", January 1990. RFC 1141: Mallory, T., and A. Kullberg, "Incremental Updating of of the Internet Checksum", BBN Communications, January 1990. Ann Westine (Westine.ISI.EDU) MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING PROJECT We have begun to consider alternative platforms for the teleconferencing system. We are continuing our investigation of the sound I/O facilities on the NeXT machine. We are also considering porting the system to a Sparcstation. Westine [Page 20]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 A new version of the background FTP program, BFTP, was released, including the BFTPTool and the MBFTPTool. BFTP.215.tar.Z is available via anonymous FTP from the "pub/" directory on "venera.isi.edu". Several teleconferences (some 4-site) were held this month including telemeetings of the ORWG, IETF and those planning the DRI testbed. Steve Casner attended the meeting of the FRICC Engineering Planning Group in Reston, VA. Eve Schooler, Steve Casner, Annette DeSchon, Dave Walden (schooler@ISI.EDU, casner@ISI.EDU, deschon@ISI.EDU, djwalden@ISI.EDU) FAST PARTS Alan Katz continued work on our electronic mail FAX server described last month. Alan Katz (katz@ISI.EDU) JVNCNET, NORTH EAST RESEARCH REGIONAL NETWORK --------------------------------------------- No report received. LOS NETTOS ---------- We are starting to develop a method for accessing the console ports of cisco routers and CSU/DSU's at remote sites. We will include the ability to power cycle the routers and CSU/DSU's. This will be available via the cisco auxilary port if a network problem does not partition a site. The consoles will also be available via dial in access, when the network is partitioned. We have integrated two monitoring tools into one character oriented display. One tool pings interfaces within the net. The other does SNMP queries to verify proper routing and EGP neighbor status. The tools run independently but the display is integrated. Walt Prue (Prue@isi.edu) Westine [Page 21]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 MERIT/UMNET ----------- No report received. MIDNET ------ No report received. MIT-LCS ------- Dave Clark organized the IRSG Workshop on the Architecture of High-Speed Networks that met during 24-26 January at BBN. Chuck Davin (jrd@PITT.LCS.MIT.EDU) MITRE Corporation ----------------- No report received. MRNET ----- Mahlon Stacy announced his resignation as Chair of MRNet. Additional work responsibilities at the Mayo Foundation left Mahlon with inadequate resources to meet MRNet's needs. Mahlon was MRNet Chair since its founding in late 1987. The MRNet Executive Committee undoubtedly speaks for all MRNet members in recognizing Mahlon's contributions to MRNet and wishing him well in his new responsibilities. MRNet's new T1 link to the NSFnet backbone at UIUC worked well in its first full month of operation. A substantial increase in traffic appears to have occurred, but January statistics are not yet available. MRNet migrated to a class B address (137.192.0.0). The class B address should position MRNet for expansion as it doubles in size in the next six months. Unified Communications, Inc. and Secure Computing Technology Corp. connected to the MRNet network in January. Management Graphics, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard expect to connect next month. The Mayo Foundation replaced its two parallel 9600 bps lines with two 56k bps lines to MRNet, upgrading from GS/3s to Ciscos in the process. Westine [Page 22]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 MRNet expects to welcome 16 new members when the mail ballots are counted in early February. by Timothy J. Salo (tjs@msc.umn.edu) NCAR/USAN --------- No report received. NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK ----------------------------------------- During January, Xylogics Incorporated and the University of Maine System were connected to the network. The core's redundancy was improved by the addition of a T1 circuit between the Open Software Foundation and Thinking Machines Incorporated. New services for 1990 including Kerberos, White Pages, NNTP, a resource guide and pocket guide were announced in the latest newsletter. NEARnet will hold its second Technical and User Seminar on March 19th. Routing problems on the JvNCnet caused significant interruption to Internet availability during the middle of the month. The problems have now been resolved and operation is stable. by John Rugo (jrugo@nic.near.net) NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC. ---------------------------------------- Craig Partridge attended the End-2-End Task Force Meeting. Karen Roubicek participated in the User-Doc Video Teleconference in preparation for the February IETF. The NNSC distributed additions to Chapter 2 of the Internet Resource Guide. Please send any information regarding available resources that you would like to submit to the Internet Resource Guide to resource- guide@nnsc.nsf.net. Requests to be added to, or removed from the distribution list should go to resource-guide-request@nnsc.nsf.net. The guide is also available via anonymous ftp at nnsc.nsf.net, cd resource- guide. Westine [Page 23]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 The NNSC Staff has also been working on updating the various online documents available on the NSFNET portion of the Info-Server. To receive the help message from the info-server, send a message to info-server@nnsc.nsf.net, in the body of the message type: REQUEST: nsfnet, TOPIC: nsfnet-help. by Corinne Carroll (ccarroll@nnsc.nsf.net) NORTHWESTNET ------------ NorthWestNet has completed its transition from commercial management by Boeing Computer Services to to management by the University of Washington. Response has been excellent. The University of Washington has elected to not use a commercial SNMP monitoring system, but rather to use a locally modified version of the NYSERnet v3.2 SNMP. Portland State is scheduled to be connected February 8. MCI has agreed to provide a 56 kbps circuit from Fargo to Seattle provided that NorthWestNet agree to assume some responsibility for maintenance and troubleshooting of the line. NorthWestNet is rapidly moving forward to install the upgrade. NorthWestnet is now in the midst of developing its 5 year plan as well as formally planning for network operations services and network administration. by Dale Smith (dsmith@oregon.uoregon.edu) NSF BACKBONE (Merit) ------------------- NSFNET BACKBONE Total packet counts for January 1990 were 2,465,715,622, up 18.1% from December 1989's 2,087,081,146 packets. Total network announcements through January 31 are 983. NETWORK PLANNING At the end of the month, Merit and IBM staffs met to explore future directions for NSFNET nodes. The potential impact to network performance due to anticipated increased traffic was discussed along with the potential for offering an OSI network layer prototype service. Westine [Page 24]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 VISITORS FROM EUROPE During the last week of January four representatives of EASINet (European Academic Supercomputer Initiative Network) met with Merit/NSFNET personnel. They discussed issues regarding the interconnection between the NSFNET and EASINet. Each now has a better understanding of the other's needs, allowing the groups to work closer together. MERIT/NSFNET PROJECT HAS NEW MANAGER OF INFORMATION SERVICES Glee Harrah Cady, formerly with Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, CA, has taken a position as the new manager of Information Services for the Merit/NSFNET staff. Cady, who previously worked as Marketing Manager for Amdahl's 5990 Processor, says her job in the upcoming months is to re-accent the name of her group. "We have a two-fold name, and a two-fold goal. First, we need to get the Information our clients need, and make it available to them. Secondly, we are a Service group. We need to not only keep up with the needs of our NSFNET clients, but anticipate those needs and create new information products to meet them." Cady, who left sunny California just in time to experience some of Michigan's fine winter weather, was Assistant Director of Computer Systems for the Research Libraries Group in Stanford before working for Amdahl. MERIT/NSFNET STAFF ACTIVITIES DURING JANUARY Dale Johnson, Manager of the Network Operations Center, represented Merit at the IAB FARNet meeting held at the San Diego Supercomputer Site on January 8 and 9. Johnson presented NSFNET status to the group as well as participating in the meeting discussions. Susan Hares attended the CICNet meeting in Columbus, Ohio, and gave a presentation on the AD-RD Model, Border Gateway Protocol, and ISO and CICNet. Dana Sitzler and Cathy Aronson also represented Merit at that meeting. by Patricia G. Smith (psmith@merit.edu) Westine [Page 25]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 NTA-RE and NDRE --------------- No report received. NYSERNET -------- No report received. OARNET ------ No report received. PREPNET-Pennsylvania Research and Economic Partnership Network -------------------------------------------------------------- LaSalle University joined PREPnet in January. This brings the total number of members to 23. PREPnet has three new resources available to members. University of Pennsylvania medical school provides a version of its MEDINFO bulletin board on PREPnet. Two of the new resources are provided by University of Pittsburgh. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) Guide contains information on scientific initiatives and administration regarding extramural programs. The Guide is published weekly, and information from the last four weeks will be online. NIAC, the NASA Industrial Applications Center at University of Pittsburgh provides the Federal Laboratory Directory. The files contain information pertaining to research centers, facilities and laboratories which function under the direction of the US government. Thomas W. Cummings PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER ------------------------------- Greg Dobrich joined the PSC networking staff. He is assuming the position of Network Coordinator. The number of networks connected through the PSC NSS and PSCNET increased by six since our last report. Westine [Page 26]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 PSC has acquired a test AS number and is presently testing the BGP in-house. In the near future we hope to conduct tests with the NSFNET. Greg Dobrich (dobrich@a.psc.edu) RIPE A coordination group for European IP internetworking has been formed. It is called RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeans) and aims at achieving maximum interconnectivity between the various wide area IP networks in Europe. Currently there are networks of regional, national and international extent. Connections between them have been made ad hoc with bi-lateral agreements about funding, acceptable-use and routing. RIPE aims to coordinate this ad hoc internet, achieve maximum connectivity for the users and a reasonable amount of manageability to the participating networks. This is no easy task because currently there is no strong pan-European backbone network comparable to NSFnet. This also means that there is no focal point for management information and coordination of technical matters such as routing, DNS, etc. These functions have to be performed in a cooperative effort of the participants. RIPE has formed four task forces to tackle the most immediate problems: 1 - Connectivity and Routing 2 - Network Management and Operations 3 - Domain Name System 4 - Formal Coordination Considerable progress has already been made in all technical areas. A global picture of existing and planned connectivity is being built, a RIPE whois database is already operational containing 129 networks which are able to access all other RIPE networks, 55 of which have Internet connected status and are connected to NSFnet. This database is used to implement some first routing policies. DNS servers are also being coordinated. First operational agreements such as backup routes and sharing of expensive international circuits are already agreed and working. More information can be obtained by anonymous ftp from mcsun.eu.net. Look in directory ripe and ripe/docs. There also is a general mailing list for all those interested in RIPE activities. To subscribe send mail to ripe-request@mcsun.eu.net. The RIPE whois database can be queried with standard whois (NICNAME) clients Westine [Page 27]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 on the same host. Currently it also contains data from the "Internet Numbers" RFC and the NSFnet routing database. All European IP service providers are invited to participate. Contact the RIPE chairman Rob Blokzijl for details. Rob can be reached by phone at +31 20 5920413. by Daniel Karrenberg (daniel.karrenberg@eu.net) SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER ------------------------------ No report received. SESQUINET --------- No report received. SRI ---- DDN NIC In January, 68 new numbers were assigned to connected IP networks. In addition, 112 numbers were assigned to unconnected networks this month. A total of 3,948 network numbers has now been assigned including 2,249 connected networks and 1,699 unconnected networks. The total number of assigned Autonomous System numbers (ASNs) is now 575. There are currently a total of 1,338 registered domains which includes 45 at the top level, 1,249 at the second level, and 44 third-level MIL domains. Douglas MacGowan Internet Research Mary Stahl participated in an editorial board meeting of the IETF User Docs Working Group by video teleconference. The topic of the teleconference was the production of a bibliography for internet users. Zaw-Sing Su participated in an ORWG teleconference this month. Mary Stahl Westine [Page 28]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 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 76 sites online and 141 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". SURAnet has signed an agreement with TELECOM*USA to install a T-1 backbone. The agreement is for 16 additional T-1 lines. Fourteen lines have been ordered to date and installation is scheduled for the period beginning February 1 through early April, with most scheduled for completion by March 8. by Jack Hahn (hahn@umd5.umd.edu) TEXAS HIGHER EDUCATION NETWORK ------------------------------ No report received. UCL ---- Zheng Wang, one of UCLs PhD students, has completed two papers on a new alternate path routing scheme which is showing great promise at congestion avoidance under high load. Jon Crowcroft attended a workshop on High Speed Networks held in Boston. John Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK) UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ---------------------- 1. Mike Davis is studying previously collected NSFNET measurement data and has started collecting similar data from our burgeoning campus network goo. He and Erik Perkins are wading through the muck of ARPANET and long-haul testbed hookups. Ken Monington is working on synchronization issues and logging mounds of cesium and LORAN timekeeping data and comparing it Westine [Page 29]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 with published USNO data. 2. Mark Shaw completed and tested a precision clock board and interface software for the IBM AT and is working on another smaller, cheaper one for general use. Stefan Levie has made substantial progress on a port of Dennis Ferguson's "xntpd" Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon to the MSDOS system and ka9q Internet environment. 3. Paul Schragger is working on simulation and performance models for high speed networks using proposed routing algorithms and various forms of contention and reservation techniques. 4. Dave Mills attended the End-2-End research group meeting at Xerox PARC and briefed the Privacy and Security research group on the authentication model practiced in NTP. He also reported status and plans of our high speed network project at the High Speed Network workshop at BBN in Cambridge. 5. Paal Spilling of the Norwegian Telecommunications Administration visited to discuss common research interests in network synchronization. He dusted off an ancient LSI-11 fuzzball system and brought up an NTP time server in Norway, with future plans to hook it to a cesium clock. 6. Edited proceedings of the INARC Workshop on the Future of the Internet System Architecture and TCP/IP Protocols, held at U Delaware last June, appeared in the January issue of the ACM Computer Communication Review. A paper "On the accuracy and stability of clocks synchronized by the Network Time Protocol in the Internet system," by D. Mills, also appeared in the same issue. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN/NCSANET -------------------------------------------------- No report received. WESTNET -------- 1. The Westnet Steering Committee met on 12 January 1990 at the University of Denver. Topics covered include: national networking, plans for FY'90, issues of policy such as who controls the Westnet gateways, what they can be used for, etc, Westine [Page 30]  Internet Monthly Report January 1990 a BITNET update, NOVELL software, and a draft costallocations algorithm for when NSF funding devolves upon the region. 2. Cisco has established Colorado State University as a beta-test site for FDDI. The FDDI hardware has been installed, and is in the process of being debugged (incl. software). 3. Westnet has a Request for proposal out for digital circuits. Responses are due back Feb. 6, 1990. by Pat Burns (pburns@csupwb.colostate.edu) Carol Ward (cward@spot.colorado.edu) Westine [Page 31]