[IMR] IMR88-10.TXT OCTOBER 1988 INTERNET MONTHLY REPORTS ------------------------ The purpose of these reports is to communicate to the Internet Research Group the accomplishments, milestones reached, or problems discovered by the participating organizations. This report is for research use only, and is not for public distribution. Each organization is expected to submit a 1/2 page report on the first business day of the month describing the previous month's activities. These reports should be submitted via network mail to Ann Westine (Westine@ISI.EDU) or Karen Roubicek (Roubicek@NNSC.NSF.NET). BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC. ---------------------------- September Report WIDEBAND NETWORK A new Wideband Butterfly Gateway was installed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA on September 21. The gateway connects JPL ethernet LAN facilities to the Wideband Network via a T1 access circuit running between JPL and the Wideband node at ISI. This new network connection has been established to support remote access to simulations running on a Hypercube located at JPL from workstations located at USAF/ESD facilities in Lexington, MA. The connection may also be used to support distributed operation of simulations on Hypercubes located at the two sites. Completion of the ESD-JPL Wideband communication path is currently awaiting the Westine [Page 1]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 connection of the "ESD-Hypercube" ethernet LAN to the operational ESD/Mitre Wideband Butterfly Gateway. This connection will be completed soon. SATNET SATNET performance was excellent during August. Statistics collected by ISI showed an average of 99% uptime for the SIMPs and 98% uptime for the attached gateways. There were only two problems. On 9/17/88, the Fucino SIMP crashed but was reloaded and restarted without any difficulty. On 9/28/88, a high error rate was reported on traffic from Fucino. This was corrected by increasing the transmit power at Fucino back to normal levels. Last month, the antenna at the Tanum Earth Station was repointed to a different satellite thus removing the Tanum SIMP and NTA-RE from the SATNET. During September, Internet connectivity to NTA-RE was restored by the installation of a point-to-point link between the Butterfly gateway at NTA-RE and the Butterfly gateway at RSRE. October Report SATNET This month the SATNET experienced several problems which caused the overall performance to be less than normal as reported by the tests from ISI. Goonhilly (93% availability) was down for two days because of a defective tape drive. Fucino (95% availability) crashed on 3 occasions and had to be reloaded manually. The cause is under investigation. The gateway at RSRE was isolated from the network for 6 days because of a problem on their kilostream link to London. Work continues on procuring and installing point to point links that will be replacing the current SATNET. The new direct link between RSRE and BBN is now being installed. Testing is expected to begin in the middle of November. This month Alex Mckenzie and Claudio Topolcic attended the SATNET and Infrastructure meeting and the open meeting of the ICB in Pisa. INTERNET R&D Our implementation of IP Multicast software for the Butterfly Gateway is now complete and we have started testing it in our lab. When it is ready we plan to beta test it some of the Butterfly Gateways around the Wideband network. Westine [Page 2]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 We have installed the hardware and software to support the new point to point line between BBN and RSRE. We have tested the hardware and software locally and are waiting for the line to be activated. Mike Brescia and Bob Hinden attended the SATNET and Infrastructure meeting and the open meeting of the ICB in Pisa. Bob Hinden (Hinden@BBN.COM) ISI --- Internet Concepts Project Greg Finn continues to run simulations of schemes that use Source Quench within IP to perform end-to-end congestion control. Greg is also working on a report of the results. Joyce Reynolds and Paul Mockapetris attended the IFIP WG 6.5 Conference in Irvine, Ca, 10- 12 October, 1988. Joyce Reynolds and Paul Mockapetris also attended the IETF Task Force meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 17-20 October, 1988. Three RFCs were published this month. RFC 1072: Jacobson, V. (LBL), and B. Braden (ISI), "TCP Extensions for Long-Delay Paths", October 1988. RFC 1073: Waitzman, D., "Telnet Window Size Option", BBN STC, October 1988. RFC 1074: Rekhter, J., "The NSF Backbone SPF based Interior Gateway Protocol", T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM, October 1988. Ann Westine (Westine.ISI.EDU) Los Nettos Los Nettos has not yet sent out its first packet but it soon will. Two lines being installed by GTE were due October 21. However the lines have not yet been turned up. The last three are due from PacBell November 4. Datatel CSU/DSU's are delayed in delivery. We hope for delivery before the last of the lines are installed. A technical group meeting was held at ISI October 26th. Pacific Bell gave a presentation on T1 technology and how Los Nettos will report problems should they occur. We also discussed how to Westine [Page 3]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 configure and bring up the network. During Pacific Bell's presentation they described a new Calif PUC tariff which will significantly reduce our T1 costs if it becomes effective in January as planned. The tariff changes could help Los Nettos grow more quickly as well. Because of the likely tariff change that could save Los Nettos about $3000 per T1 installation we are defering orders for phase two lines for Los Nettos until we can qualify for the new tariff. Los Nettos is still looking for more participants for phase two of the network. Our network topology will be developed in phases so that we can build a well connected, robust, low cost topology. Any sites wishing to participate in phase 2 should contact Walt Prue soon. Discussions are in progress with the University of California Office of the President to get a donation of some bandwidth between Los Nettos and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Walter Prue (Prue@ISI.EDU) Multimedia Conferencing Project This month a teleconference facility was installed at SRI as the fourth site in the multimedia teleconferencing system. The four sites (BBN, DARPA, ISI, SRI) are linked by the Wideband Net that carries both realtime packet voice and video traffic plus datagram traffic for text and graphics in the shared multimedia workspace. The new site should provide more opportunities for northern California folks to participate, and opens the possibility of four-site teleconferences. Part of PVP, the butterfly-resident packet video host, was rewritten in preparation for future variable data rates. Variable rates will allow better image quality when only two sites participate. Work continued on making the multimedia conference control program (MMCC) more robust. This focused on communication between MMCC and the Voice Terminal program (VT), on changes to the configuration file format, and the program's user interface. Additionally, redesign of autopilot mode was completed. This will make it easier to control connections remotely and in turn make it easier to get conferences going for new users at sites away from the experts (e.g., at SRI). Westine [Page 4]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 A demonstration of the multimedia conferencing system was given to visitors from Concept Communications, suppliers of our video codec. Steve and Eve attended the TeleCon VIII Conference in Anaheim, CA, and heard all about the latest in video codecs and teleconferencing hardware. Steve also attended the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Ann Arbor to participate in the newly-formed ST and Connection-Oriented IP Working Group. Steve Casner, Dave Walden, Eve Schooler (casner@ISI.EDU, djwalden@ISI.EDU, schooler@ISI.EDU) NSFNET Project Annette Deschon made improvements and fixed bugs in BFTP. She (1) updated both BFTP and the BFTPTool to use the latest SRI time parsing routines written by Ken Harrenstien; (2) incorporated Dave Curry's fixes to handle suspend and interrupt signals in the BFTP parser; (3) fixed a bug in which BFTP would give up on a transfer prematurely in the event that a nameserver was down; and (4) tested against a number of FTP-server implementations. Dave Mills fixed Fuzzball FTP bugs she uncovered (we wish ALL FTP implementors were as responsive to bugs we have found!!) Planned BFTP projects include: conversion of BFTP and BFTP to Sun OS 4.0, more documentation, and changes to allow the user to specify that an alternate directory for BFTP request files. Annette started work on a version of NNStat for Sun OS 4.0. She also reviewed a draft of the Hosts Requirements RFC and attended a one-day Los Nettos meeting held at ISI. Bob Braden continued work on the Host Requirements RFC, preparing a new version for discussion at the IETF meeting in Ann Arbor. He attended the IETF meeting, and chaired a 1.5 day meeting of the Host Requirements Working Group. RFC-1072, "TCP Extensions for Long-Delay Paths", authored by Van Jacobson of LBL and Bob Braden of ISI, was published. This paper was produced at the behest of the End-to-End task force. Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon (Braden@ISI.EDU, DeSchon@ISI.EDU) MIT-LCS ------- No report received. Westine [Page 5]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 MITRE Corporation ----------------- No report received. NTA-RE and NDRE --------------- No report received. SRI --- No report received. UCL --- We have started work on the design of an expert system to interface with a simulation system for studying routing and congestion control problems in Broadband ISDN. Areas of particular interest are "Mothers Day" synchronised overload, and correlated real-time traffic. We have now obtained some primary rate ISDN interfaces, and are awaiting lines so that we can start experimentation with interconnecting LANs over ISDN. John Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK) UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ---------------------- 1. Paul Schragger is using the MIT network simulator to examinine a priority or type-of-service queueing element in a network level switch. The model has a high-priority queue and a low- priority queue and service elements which can serve either or both queues. The service policy is designed to provide a ration of high-priority and low-priority service according to a cost function based on mean service rate and mean delay. He is currently experimenting with various regimes of arrival rates and cost functions. 2. Mike Minnich has been reorganizing the campus NTP clock hierarchy. There are now three stratum-2 servers for the entire campus, each of which peers with two different stratum-1 servers elsewhere on the Internet. Each stratum-3 Westine [Page 6]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 departmental computing cluster or file server peers with all three stratum-2 servers. Stratum-4 departmental workstation clients obtain time from their stratum-3 server and may also peer with one or more other stratum-4 clients. We believe this scheme is incredibly robust, yet involves only modest peering overhead. 3. The new telephone-time service provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nee NBS) was tested both on IBM PC and Sun workstations. Preliminary results indicate the NTP stratum-1 (primary) time servers aggree with the telephone time to within about 10 ms. Mohamed Ellozy of NIST provided the testing code and is interested in installing NTP for testing as well. DECWRL has just become the eleventh NTP primary time server on the Internet. All eleven are presently chiming truetime. The promised journal article on NTP is finished except for some diagrams. 4. The 25-year old LORAN-C radionavigation system is being refurbished with new timing generators capable of synchronization to UTC with accuracies in the nanosecond regime. I have suggested the new generators be designed to phase-modulate the LORAN-C signal with timecode information similar to that used for the NIST WWV/WWVB/GOES services. This would provide many more transmitters at much higher powers than the NIST services and possibly result in cheaper timecode receivers with less demanding antenna instalations. 5. Jeff Simpson is still working on his logical-list processor for policy-based routing and a paper explaining how it all works. Chuck Cranor has completed the design for a 3x3 VLSI digital crossbar switch as a class project. He is working with Paul Schragger on possible extensions to his design and possible application to a high-speed reservation-based packet network. Mike Davis is busy scarfing up the NSFNET Phase-I Backbone performance data lying around the Interet for use in a class project. Dave Mills worked out the entropy and some hashing properties of Internet address assignments and played the issues for senior gurus. Dave also participated with Annette DeSchon of ISI and Joel Gartland of FTP Software in tests involving three-way FTP transfers with generally joyful results. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) Westine [Page 7]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 NSF NETWORKING -------------- NSF NETWORKING UCAR/BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC., NNSC Craig Partridge attended the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting where he chaired a Management Information Base working group session and participated in the Internics meeting. Karen Roubicek attended the ACM SIGUCCS meeting on User Services and ran a Birds of a Feather session on NSFNET. The fifth issue of the NSF Network News was published and distributed at the end of October. For additional copies, please send a message to nnsc@nnsc.nsf.net. by Karen Roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net) NSFNET BACKBONE (MERIT) October again shows a steady increase in traffic on the NSFNET backbone.The number of networks with primary connections to NSFNET through the mid-level networks has gone from 292 at the end of September to 305 at present. __________________________________________________ Packets in Packets out September 314,675,718 304,171,588 October 443,389,133 356,779,596 % increase 29.0% 14.7% ___________________________________________________ Packet counts are taken at the token ring interface to the E- PSP in each Nodal Switching Subsystem (NSS) via SGMP. The hourly counts are collected and stored in a database on the Information Services host machine. Information from this database is planned for public availability in November. Other databases planned for public release within the next few weeks are now in the final stages of staff testing. These include information on site contacts, routing data, and general documentation. Major planning efforts are underway to develop a comprehensive schedule for upgrading the Nodal Switching Subsystems and Network Management Subsystems in the next year. These are Westine [Page 8]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 aimed at implementing the goals outlined for Phase 1A in Merit's proposal to NSF. Merit's Susan Hares organized an IETF/FARNET working group to discuss how the NSFNET backbone, regional networks, and campus networks could cooperate to solve user problems expediently. The first meeting of this group, the IETF Joint Monitoring Access for Adjacent Networks (NSFNET-JoMAAN), focusing on the NSFNET community was held October 17, 1988 during the IETF meeting in Ann Arbor, MI. Susan chairs the group and twelve of the thirteen regional sites sent representatives to the meeting. Additional representatives from NSF, Arpanet, DDN and NSN participated. NSFNET site representatives also gathered at a luncheon during the IETF meeting to discuss areas of common concern with the Merit/NSFNET staff. A number of Merit/NSFNET staff members participated in Educom 88 in Washington, D.C.during October. A fully-functional NSS was on exhibit and used to provide Internet connections to conference participants. A group of Internet addresses have been permanently assigned for use by this traveling node during future conferences and trade shows. by Ellen Hoffman (Ellen_Hoffman@um.cc.umich.edu) NSFNET BACKBONE SITES & MID-LEVEL NETWORK SITES BARRNET No report received. CERFNET No report received. CORNELL UNIVERSITY THEORY CENTER No report received. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN/NCSANET No report received. JOHN VON NEUMANN NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER No report received. Westine [Page 9]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 MERIT/UMNET Merit has continued to refine the Merit INP over IP implementation. Submitted by Merit/NSFNET Information Services (NSFNET- info@merit.edu) MIDNET No report received. MRNET There are several new officers of MRnet. The MRnet officers are: o Mahlon Stacy, Chair mcs@mayo.edu o Dan McCreary, Vice-Chair dan@gonzo.eta.com o Carl Henry, Treasurer (replaces Peter Pyclik) chenry@carleton.edu o Tim Salo, Secretary (replaces Ken Carlson) tjs@uc.msc.umn.edu MRnet is preparing for expansion. The MRnet network is in place; the next objective is to offer network services to more organizations. An MRnet brochure has been printed to assist in attracting new members. MRnet is also raising funds to pay for the link to the NSFnet during 1989 and thereby provide a reliable Internet connection. With the recent attachment of St. Olaf College to MRNet, we are now announcing the following member networks: 128.101.0.0 UMN-NET U of Minnesota, Minneapolis U of Minnesota, Duluth Minnesota Supercomputer Center 192.35.86.0 UMN-MORRIS-NET U of Minnesota, Morris 129.28.0.0 ETA-LAN ETA Systems 129.176.0.0 MAYO Mayo Foundation 129.191.0.0 NSCO Network Systems Corp. 129.205.0.0 CDCNET Control Data Corp. 130.71.0.0 STOLAF St. Olaf College 192.12.250.0 MRNET Minnesota Regional Net hub Westine [Page 10]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 as well as forwarding mail for Cray Research (CRAY.COM). by Tim Salo (tjs@uc.msc.umn.edu) Stuart Levy (slevy@uc.msc.umn.edu) NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH AND UNIVERSITY SATELLITE NETWORK PROJECT USAN was down for eight hours in October for Vitalink to test its satellite transponders. Sometime in November, Los Alamos National Lab (AS #68) will EGP peer with the NCAR NSS and directly connect to the NSFNET, nets 192.5.16, 192.16.16, and 128.65 via a 56Kbit link and cisco boxes. Still unexplained is the additional 100 msec delay for round- trip times over the satellite links that occured after the upgrade to Comstream modems earlier this year. The modems were installed at all sites to correct a drop-out problem. Current RTT's are now in the neighborhood of 640 msecs. by Don Morris (morris@windom.ucar.edu) NORTHWESTNET The NorthWestNet annual meeting was held October 10-12 in Beaverton, OR. Two new commercial members, Battelle (DOE Richland WA) and Intel Corp. (Beaverton OR) have joined NorthWestNet. by JQ Johnson (jqj@oregon.uoregon.edu) NYSERNET No report received. OARNET No report received. PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER PSCnet is carring traffic for several new campuses, including Univ. of Toledo (192.42.112), a new Penn State network (130.204), and University of Akron (130.101). There has been no significant down time for our connectivity to the NSFnet. Westine [Page 11]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 The T1 link to SURAnet is under heavy use: carrying almost 1 Million packets per day. Since this line parallels the NSFnet, it is considered redundant and its continued support is in question. We are preparing the PSC internal network for the installation of the new Cray Y-MP in mid December. We will be providing connectivity directly to the Cray via both HYPERchannel and an FEI-3. No network related service outages are expected either for Cray X-MP access of for PSCnet through traffic. by Matt Mathis (mathis@fornax.ece.cmu.edu) SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER No report received. SESQUINET On October 17th, Guy Almes chaired the second meeting of the IETF Working Group on Interconnectivity. We focussed on getting feedback from IETF members at an open session, then working to revise EGP-3 during a closed session. We are specifically working to liberalize the "core" model of EGP-2 to better meet the demands of the current NSFnet Model with multiple national backbones, mid-levels, and campus networks. The complete initially proposed SesquiNet configuration has been operational for a year now. The following campus networks are being served, and are advertised via EGP to NSFnet and (currently via UIUC) to the Arpanet core: Baylor College of Medicine 128.249 BCM-Technologies 192.31.88 Houston Area Research Center 192.31.87 Prairie View A&M University 129.208 Rice University 128.42 Texas A&M University 128.194 Texas Southern University 192.31.101 and the University of Houston 129.7 Westine [Page 12]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 In addition we are advertising to NSFnet the following networks in cooperation with the University of Texas: UT-Austin 128.83 UT-HSC-Houston 129.106 UT-Arlington 129.107 UT-ElPaso 129.108 UT-MB-Galveston 129.109 UT-Dallas 129.110 UT-HSC-SanAntonio 129.111 UT-HSC-Dallas 129.112 UT-PermianBasin 129.113 UT-CCSPRD 129.114 UT-CHPC-Hyperchannel 129.116 Texas Tech University 129.118 University of North Texas 129.120 UT-SanAntonio 192.6.201 THEnet 192.16.72 and UT-Austin-TestNetwork 192.16.73 The new NSFnet backbone node at Rice University became operational during the last week of June, and has proved quite reliable. FTPs of 96kb/s across the new NSFnet are typical. The triangle connecting UT-Austin, Texas A&M, and Rice University is now up and operational. by Guy Almes (almes@rice.edu) SURANET No report received. Westine [Page 13]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 WESTNET 1. Testing of SNMP was begun at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After experience is gained, we plan to run it at selected locations within Westnet. 2. The Westnet Steering Committee acted to form two subcommittees. The first is chaired by Kelly McDonald of Brigham Young University, and will assess Bitnet issues, including a feasibility assessment of routing Bitnet traffic over digital circuits within Westnet. The second is chaired by Bob Leach of the University of Arizona, and will attempt to establish appropriate divisions of responsibility of NIC/NOC activity among the campuses and central Westnet staff. 3. The circuit between New Mexico Technet (NMT) and NCAR was subject to an unacceptably high error rate (10%). A variety of strategies were implemented to alleviate this problem, Some of which will be enumerated here. (1) Cisco reported that the cables between serial ports and CSU/DSU's should not exceed 5' in length. We had a number of cables which exceeded this length (some by half an order of magnitude). This was corrected, and seemed to decrease the error rate by on the order of one percent. (2) Some of the CPU ROM's, ver. 6.1(626), in the ciscos were out of date. The CPU ROM's were upgraded to the most recent (ver. 2.9), and this reduced the error rate by a similar amount. (3) Finally, new ROM's (ver. 2.9) were installed in the serial boards. This resulted in much improved performance (error rate of less than one percent). New ROMs for the serial boards have been ordered for all Westnet nodes. 4. This has resulted in some interesting tests being done by Carol Ward and David Wood. They have measured the error rate on one serial port when doing a local loopback while the other port was: disconnected, connected, and routing was turned off. They observed some inexplicable interdependence of the error rate, depending on what is happening with the other serial port. We are in contact with cisco, and will keep the pressure on. by Patrick J Burns (pburns@super.org) Westine [Page 14]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 TASK FORCE REPORTS ------------------ APPLICATIONS -- USER INTERFACE The task force met September 12-13 at ANSA Headquarters in Cambridge, England. We took this opportunity to tap the Cambridge computer science community, with observers from EuroPARC, Olivetti Research Ltd., and the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory (in addition to our own long-standing member from ANSA, Joe Sventek). With a resulting attendance of 18, 9 of whom were observers, this meeting had a distinct "workshop" flavor. Close to half the meeting was spent discussing user interface architecture. Several people entered the meeting believing their architectures were radically at odds with those proposed by other parties, but left the meeting believing the architectures were in fact quite similar. For example, there was general agreement that we need something considerably more powerful than user interface toolkits such as Xt and Andrew. Such toolkits are particularly deficient with respect to support for multi-user interactions---e.g. two participants in a real-time conference cannot see two different views of the data. Indeed, this same deficiency also prevents users of existing toolkits from altering, for example, the layout of related windows on the screen without modifying the associated application(s); yet, it should be possible, for example, for one user to have all his scrollbars or button menus on the right whereas another user has them on the left. While different people used different terminology to address this problem, the common approach was to introduce another level of abstraction "above" that of Xt's widgets or Andrew's views. In my own case, for example, this leads to a distinction between "application interface objects" and "presentation objects", with the latter being roughly equivalent to Xt widgets and the former providing complete isolation between data and view (necessary, for example, in order for two different participants in a conference to see two different views of the data simultaneously). Ultimately, there was general agreement with my "reminder" of our previously agreed-upon distinctions between reference models, architectures, and implementations---where there may be many different implementations of a given architecture and many architectures that conform to a given reference mode--- and with the related claim that more work was needed on all three fronts. To that end, I have instituted a smaller Westine [Page 15]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 working group to develop a strawman (or strawmen), which effort can be regarded as the second major joint effort of the task force to date (the first being voice servers). Other highlights of the meeting included: - There were several nice contributions with respect to floor control (in the context of real-time teleconferencing). For example, Earl Craighill (SRI International) presented a layered model of real-time multi-user interactions wherein the floors for each interaction mode ("read only" discussions, foreground updates, and background updates) could be dealt with separately. He then discussed four specific floor control algorithms for use in various contexts, the most interesting being their support for interjections--- specifically, permitting any party to speak (and be heard) for some fixed quantum of time, even if the person with the floor does not give it up. While this algorithm cuts interjections off (if the person with the floor does not stop speaking), it is more user friendly than the usual "only one person may speak at a time" algorithm. Subsequently, Lester Ludwig (Bellcore) discussed some "audio windowing" techniques that permit computer-based conferencing to come even closer to emulating face-to-face meetings---by permitting all parties to speak at once, but, via special audio effects, to permit one party to be heard "better" or "more easily". - High-quality audio/video is all the rage. Nine of the organizations represented at the meeting (Olivetti Research Center, Olivetti Research Ltd., ISI, Xerox PARC, Xerox EuroPARC, Bellcore, Sun, HP Labs, and Cambridge University) have developed or are developing extensive audio/video testbeds, all computer-controllable, but using a variety of analog and digital networks. Two major items on most of these groups' wish lists are networks capable of adequately supporting (digital) audio and video, and a cheaper alternative to the Parallax graphics+video board (which is the only currently available product capable of providing live video in a window). Not surprisingly, several of these same organizations are working to satisfy both these wishes. - Also with respect to video, Phil Gust (HP Labs) has started an effort to extend/adapt Olivetti's VOX audio server to support video. Westine [Page 16]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 - Based on Bill Buxton's overview and a subsequent visit by the task force to their offices, Xerox EuroPARC is definitely a place to watch---in the domains of human- computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. - Ditto for Olivetti Research Ltd. (trying to be objective here!)--- in the domain of networking. Keith Lantz (LANTZ@ORC.OLIVETTI.COM) AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS The ANTF will meet jointly with Barry Leiner's November Workshop. A second meeting is planned for February in conjunction with the Privacy Task Force. Deborah Estrin (Estrin@OBERON.USC.EDU) END-TO-END SERVICES The End-to-End Task force met at Stanford University on August 16, 1988, one day prior to SIGCOMM'88. The group will meet again on November 3-4 at MIT LCS. Recent Task Force efforts have concerned the following areas: A. IP Multicasting 1. Plan: make useable implementations of IP multicasting widely available. (a) Host implementation for 4.3+BSD. A prototype implementation has been done, and we are trying to get it meshed into the BSD sofware releases. (b) Multicast router implementation for RIP-based gateway. A prototype implementation was done at BBN, although it needs more work and is awaiting further funding. An RFC describing the protocol has been submitted and should be published soon. (c) Multicast router implementation for SPF-based gateway. An implementation of multicast routing for butterfly gateways is in progress at BBN. Westine [Page 17]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 2. Plan: nurture applications of IP multicasting. Most of the current interest in using IP multicasting is to invoke local-network multicasting; for example, the OSPFIGP group is considering its use for multicasting routing updates. Local network applications are important and immediately useful, although we believe that trans-gateway multicasting will lead to more exciting new applications. B. Transaction Transport Protocols 1. Plan: Make VMTP readily available for experimentation in a variety of contexts. A release of VMTP for a 4.3+BSD or Sun OS 4.0 system is scheduled for November 1988. C. Performance Issues 1. Plan: Develop specifications for experimental TCP performance extensions. This was accomplished with the publication of RFC-1072, "TCP Extensions for Long Delay Paths". 2. Broad research question: can adaptive rate-based flow control be made to work stably and fairly, as window-based flow control now does? 3. Broad research questions: the pros and cons of onboard protocol processing vs. outboard processing, and the necessity of special "high performance" transport protocols. 4. Broad research question: The organization of the transport layer and its interface to the application layer. For example, where should marshalling/ demarshalling, checksumming, and data copying be performed for maximum performance? 5. Other areas of concern: * Applying transport performance ideas to other protocols, especially UDP-based applications. * Developing useful tools for measuring and simulating transport protocol performance. Westine [Page 18]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 * Performance (as well as "power") of known data structuring protocols (ASN.1, Courier, etc.). Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) INTERNET ARCHITECTURE The next meeting of the INARC Task Force will be held in conjunction with the IAB meeting in Santa Clara, CA, on 10-11 January 1989. The workshop will include invited presentations by research contributors from throughout the Internet community and especially the IAB and its task forces. Important areas of research interest include policy-based technologies, advanced routing architectures, high-speed networks and interfaces, network management, congestion avoidance/control and advanced transport protocols. Present plans for the first day are for the IAB task-force chairs to present in-depth summaries of past activity and anticipated future work. This will include an assessment of other ongoing work in the area, with special emphasis on issues affecting the growth in size, scope and interoperability of the Internet. On the second day volunteers are solicited to present concise papers of 20-30 minutes in an area of specialization. Appropriate papers may be selected for publication in the ACM Computer Communication Review. Volunteers do not have to be members of the IAB, its task forces or their dependents. Prospective attendees do not have to volunteer a paper, but they must expect to be harassed and caught up in lively discussions. Please send a note expressing your interest and/or paper topic to mills@udel.edu. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) INTERNET ENGINEERING 1) The IETF met on October 17-19 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The meeting was hosted by Hans-Werner Braun and Elise Gerich of Merit. The agenda, as executed at the meeting, is given below. Proceedings for the June USNA meeting were distributed at Ann Arbor and will be available from the NIC. Westine [Page 19]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 2) The final agenda of the Oct 17-19 meeting: MONDAY, OCTOBER 17 9:00 am Opening Plenary, Introductions and local arrangements 9:30 am Working Group Morning Sessions o Host Requirements, Members Only (Braden, ISI) o ST and Connection-Oriented IP (Topolcic, BBN) o CMIP-Over-TCP Net Management (Lee LaBarre, MITRE) o Interconnectivity and EGP3 (Almes, Rice) o Open SPF IGP (Petry, UMD and Moy, Proteon) 1:30 pm Working Group Afternoon Sessions o Host Requirements, Open (Braden, ISI) o ST and Connection-Oriented IP (Topolcic, BBN) o CMIP-Over-TCP Net Management (Lee LaBarre, MITRE) o Interconnectivity and EGP3 (Almes, Rice) o Management Information Base (Partridge, BBN) 5:00 pm Recess 7:30 pm o Working Group for Joint Monitoring Access for Adjacent Networks focusing on the NSFNET Community (Hares, Merit) TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18 9:00 am Opening Plenary 9:15 am Morning Working Group Sessions o Host Requirements, Members Only (Braden, ISI) o TELNET Linemode (Dave Borman, Cray) o Authentication (Schiller, MIT) o Performance and Congestion Control (Mankin, MITRE) o Point-Point Protocol (Perkins, Hobby, Prindeville) o PDN Routing (Rokitansky, FernUni Hagen) 1:00 pm Opening Plenary Statement (Gross, MITRE) 1:15 pm Network Status Reports o Merit NSFnet Report (Braun, UMich) o IBM NSFnet Report (Drescher, IBM) o Arpanet/DDN Report (Lepp, BBN) o Internet Report (Brescia, BBN) o Interop 88 Network Report or `How to build a complex internet in 2 days' (Almquist) 3:45 pm Network Performance Presentations o Packets Over A Different Kind Of Ether, including Amateur Packet Radio Demonstration (Karn, Bellcore) o Keeping The Usual Ether Filled Up With High Performance TCP (Jacobson, LBL) 5:00 pm Recess 7:00 pm NSFNET NOC Tour Westine [Page 20]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19 9:00 am Congestion Control Observations Using NETMON (Mankin, MITRE) 9:30 am Working Group Reports and Group Discussion o Authentication (Schiller, MIT) o CMIP-over-TCP (CMOT) (LaBarre, MITRE) o Interconnectivity (Brim, Cornell) o Host Requirements (Braden, ISI) o Internet MIB (Partridge, BBN) o Joint NSFNET/Regional Monitoring (Hares, Merit) o Open SPF-based IGP (Petry, UMD) o Open Systems Routing (Lepp, BBN) o PDN Routing (Rokitansky, FernUni Hagen) o Performance and CC (Mankin, MITRE) 1:00 pm Working Group Reports and Group Discussion (cont) o Pt-Pt Protocol (Perkins, CMU) o ST and CO-IP (Topolcic, BBN) o TELNET Linemode (Borman, Cray) 1:45 pm What is Usenet?, What Is NNTP? (Spafford, Purdue) 2:30 pm The NIC Domain Chart (Lottor, SRI-NIC) 2:45 pm On Some T1 Satellite Link Performance (Lekashman, Ames) 3:15 pm Concluding Plenary Remarks 3:30 pm Adjourn (Rush to Airport) 3) The following chart gives a synopsis of IETF Working Group progress, where `NA' means `Not Applicable' and `-' means `No'. The three groups marked with `*' are newly formed since the June USNA meeting. This type of status report will be updated and reported in future Internet Monthly Reports. For additional information on IETF Working Group activities, send a note to ietf- request@venera.isi.edu. Active Charter RFC or Met at USNA Met at Working Groups Submitted? IDEA? USNA? Report? Ann Arbor? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Authentication Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes CMIP-over-TCP (CMOT) Yes Yes - - Yes Interconnectivity* Yes NA NA Yes Host Requirements Yes - Yes Yes Yes Internet MIB Yes Yes Yes - Yes Joint NSFNET Monitoring*Yes NA NA Yes Open SPF-based IGP Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Open INOC Yes - Yes Yes - Open Systems Routing Yes Yes Yes - - PDN Routing Group Yes Yes Yes Yes Westine [Page 21]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 Performance and CC - - Yes Yes Yes Pt-Pt Protocol Yes Yes Yes - Yes ST and CO-ip* Yes Yes NA NA Yes TELNET Linemode Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes ------------------------------ Groups with completed missions ------------------------------ Domain - Yes Yes - NA EGP3 Yes Yes - - NA OSI Technical Issues Yes Yes - - NA Short Term Routing Yes Yes Yes Yes NA SNMP Extensions - Yes Yes - NA Phill Gross (gross@gateway.mitre.org) INTERNET MANAGEMENT No report received. PRIVACY Minutes from the September Privacy Task Force meeting were distributed to the task force and to the privacy-interest mailing list. Some work was performed on updates to the key management RFC based on September meeting discussion and on inputs from RSA Data Security, Inc. The provisional 6 December RFC review session remains provisional at this time, pending the status of the revision effort. Plans for the next full-scale task force meeting, to be held February 14-16, 1989 at ISI (partly in joint session with the Autonomous Networks Task Force) were stabilized. John Linn (Linn@CCY.BBN.COM) ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY No report received. SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING No report received. Westine [Page 22]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 DSAB - Distributed Systems Architecture Board --------------------------------------------- The Distributed Systems Architecture Board has several active task forces. This report contains a summary of the efforts of the past few months of two of them. A Report from the User Interface Task Force Report: Keith Lantz, Olivetti Research Center, Menlo Park, CA The task force met this summer at Olivetti Research Center in Menlo Park. The major topics of discussion were group work, user interface architecture, video, and real-time requirements of voice and video. The resulting highlights were - Andy Schulert of On Technology (and formerly principal architect of Open Dialogue at Apollo) added his support to the argument that, in the world of "network computing", "user interface toolkits" would be better placed on the same machine with the window server. This effectively means encapsulating them in a separate server (as is being doing at Olivetti, for example) or in the window server itself (as several groups are doing with NeWS). - Greg Foster of Xerox PARC noted that the Colab group is moving away from "electronic meeting rooms" per se to the more general concept of "shared workspaces". The idea is to provide support for the sorts of serendipitous meetings that occur throughout the day- --in the lounge, by the coffee pot, and in people's offices--- rather than require people to pick up all their notes and move to a dedicated room to have a meeting. As for video, T1- (also CDI-) quality implies 200 Kbytes/sec throughput. As with voice, this presents no problem bandwidth- wise, but rather with regard to response (to request to store or retrieve individual frames). However, true broadcast TV requires roughly 60 Mb and studio quality requires 140 Mb bandwidth, either of which present significant problems for UNIX. Steve Casner reported on the Video Working Group Media Lab. First, since video is the newest kid on the block, a taxonomy of uses (and advantages over other media) has yet to emerge. Second, there appeared to be a consensus that doing video "right" is all the harder because TV has made people accustomed to relatively high quality; that is, expectations are so high. Third, there was a feeling that researchers may be placing too much emphasis on either achieving, at low speeds, quality currently achievable only at T1 rates, or achieving much better quality without regard to bandwidth requirements, rather than giving users the ability to select Westine [Page 23]  Internet Monthly Report October 1988 between quality and cost. Fourth, there is a clear need for authoring systems. - As for voice server work, projects continue at the Sun New Media Workstation Group to create a full-function PC- based server using the TI speech board and at Olivetti Research Center on a software "audio server" that does for audio what window servers do for graphics (and then some --- e.g. computer-controlled mixing and routing). The design specification on the latter will be available shortly. A Report from the Naming Task Force: Larry Peterson, University of Arizona Karen Sollins, Mic Bowman (one of my Ph.D. students), and I have have been working on the RFC describing UNP (Universal Naming Protocol). The going has not been as fast as we'd like, but we have been able to hammer out most of the details. The plan is to have a draft specification and an example implementation done sometime this fall. Members of the naming task force, as well as several other interested individuals, have been studying X.500 and comparing it with UNP. The consensus is that UNP has a more flexible data set (especially its type system) and supports a richer functionality (i.e., supports client-defined resolution functions). It also seems to be the case that UNP is more fully specified (or at least will be once the specification is done); it's not at all clear that two independent implementations of X.500 will be able to talk to each other. Charlotte Tubis (Tubis@Purdue.Edu)