<NIS.NSF.NET> [IMR] IMR86-04.TXT
APRIL 1986
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 task forces and contractors in the ARPA Internet Research Program.
This report is for research use only, and is not for public
distribution.
Each task force and contractor 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 ARPANET mail to
Westine@USC-ISIB.ARPA.
Reports are requested from BBN, LINKABIT, ISI, LL, MIT-LCS, NTA, SRI,
UCL, and UCLA.
Other groups are invited to report newsworthy events or issues.
BBN LABORATORIES AND BBN COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION .Grab=5;
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WIDEBAND NETWORK
On 1 April a demonstration of simultaneous packet video and packet
voice across the Wideband Network was held. This demonstration
supported a cross-country video conference to discuss multimedia
mail.
During the previous week, packet video equipment was moved from
Lincoln Labs to BBN. Also during that week, software work on the
BSAT stream facility (low delay TDMA service) was completed and used
for the first time in the Wideband Net. The video conference
successfully used the stream facility for the demonstration on 1
April.
Also during April, the CMU and SRI sites were returned to working
order. There are now eight operational Wideband Net sites.
DIAMOND MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM
We have started to schedule a regular weekly time slot (Thursdays,
1pm-3pm ET) for holding multimedia conferences between BBN and ISI
using the BBN Diamond Multimedia Conferencing System, the ISI Packet
Video System system and the BBN/ISI Packet Voice System system. All
three systems use the Wideband Network for data transfer. Initially
we will be using the conferencing facility ourselves, however after a
while, we will be interested is letting others evaluate the system
and give us their reactions and suggestions. People who are
interested in testing this facility should contact Harry Forsdick
(Forsdick@BBNA.ARPA) or Steve Casner (Casner@USC-ISIB.ARPA).
GATEWAYS
Release 3 of the Butterfly Internet Gateway software was installed in
all of the Butterfly Gateways. This release of software is the first
to contain dynamic routing (SPF and EGP). Also included in the
release is Satnet HDH support, improved monitoring and control,
improved Arpanet support, interface up/down, and bug fixes.
We installed the first two Butterfly Gateways on Satnet, one in the
U.S. at CSS and one in Europe at CNUCE (in Pisa, Italy). The gateway
for NTA will be installed in the middle of May. The gateways for the
U.K. will be installed shortly there after.
There are now 10 Butterfly Internet Gateways installed. They are:
BBN-UCC, BBN-WB, CMU-WB, CNUCE, CSS, IPTO, ISI, MIT, MIT-WB, and
SRI-WB.
SATNET
During April, SATNET service continued to be stable. The channel 1
module at Fucino was fixed. Also, joint efforts by Stan Rothschild
(COMSAT) and Kim Kaiser further improved the channel situation. They
took the first step toward correcting the PSP terminal adjustments by
tuning the frequencies used by the hardware. Tanum continued to lack
channel 1 service, but retained internet connectivity and service via
channel 0.
A major milestone was reached when CNUCE in Pisa Italy was gateway'd
to the SATNET. The SIMP at Roaring Creek was upgraded with an MSYNC
board and together with the SIMP at Fucino received the HDH/HDLC
software needed to support the new Butterfly gateways. The new
gateways were then installed at CSS and CNUCE.
Bob Hinden
ISI .Grab=8;
---
Internet Concepts Project
Greg Finn finished two reports on a new routing mechanism for
packet switched networks which has several advantages over
currently used algorithms. In particular the ability to scale
upward indefinitely and a relatively transparent treatment for
mobile hosts, which are treated no differently than non-mobile
hosts as far as intermediate routing nodes are concerned.
Annette DeSchon converted the ISI Internet protocol software,
which runs on the XEROX Dandelion workstation, to run under XDE
version 4.0. The problems that prevented the Dandelions from
receiving odd-byte-length packets and packets greater than 576
bytes in length have been solved. These problems were solved by
building new bootfiles which incorporated several XEROX bug fixes.
In addition, she developed an enhanced version of the XEROX
Ethernet SpyTool, which is being used for performance analysis of
TCP based FTP over the wideband network. This SpyTool will also
be used to analyze the performance of new protocols such as the
NETBLT protocol, which is currently being developed at MIT.
Jon Postel edited two RFCs that were published this month.
RFC 982 -- ANSI, "Guidelines for the Specification of the
Structure of the Domain Specific Part (DSP) of the ISO Standard
NSAP Address".
RFC 983 -- Cass, D.E,. Rose, M.T., "ISO Transport Services on
Top of the TCP".
Ann Westine
Multimedia Conferencing Project
During the successful multimedia teleconference held on April 1
and reported last month, the Wideband Net was operating with only
the ISI and BBN sites up and running an unreleased version of the
BSAT software. Now the equivalent version has been released to all
sites so it is once again possible to run packet video using
stream transmission. With the packet video rate and stream
parameters tuned to allow operation with all sites present on the
network, we are now ready for routine operation of packet video
and multimedia conferencing. We have begun a series of planned
weekly teleconferences to test the system's effectiveness. Small
groups in the vicinity of ISI and BBN are invited to try
telecommunicating with each other by signing up for one of the
weekly slots. Contact Casner@USC-ISIB.ARPA or Forsdick@BBNA.ARPA.
Brian Hung is working on expanding the existing bitmap file
produced by the IBM-PC AT linearly by one half so that the
resulting bitmap file will fill an entire 11" X 8 1/2" page when
output on the Imagen. This is due to the fact that the Microtek
MS-200 scanner has a 200 dot per inch resolution whereas the
Imagen printer has a 300 dot per inch resolution.
Ann Westine
Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project
Alan Katz produced a Supercomputer bibliography, and is beginning
to document information he is finding out about supercomputers,
and contemplating the design of a Virtual Windowing protocol for
use with remote supercomputers.
Command and Control Graphics Project
No internet-related progress to report.
Richard Bisbey
Computer Center
No internet-related progress to report.
Seminars
PAUL MOCKAPETRIS gave a seminar on the following papers:
Chen, Peter Pin-Shan, "The Compact Disk ROM: How It Works,"
IEEE Spectrum, April 1986, pp.44-49. Oren, T. and G. A.
Kildall, "The Compact Disk ROM: Applications Software", IEEE
Spectrum, April 1986, pp.49-54.
ALAN KATZ discussed the topic, "More about supercomputers and how
people use them," (an update from the last seminar on this
topic). Alan also reported on the paper: Smarr, Larry, "An
Approach to Complexity: Numerical Computations," Science, 26
April 1985, page 403.
GREG FINN discussed the topic: "Some Technical Problems in
Metropolitan Scale Internetworking," Constructing a
metropolitan scale internetwork will entail interconnecting
potentially many thousands of component networks. Using
today's internetworking technologies, problems are
encountered which limit size and prevent uniform scaling.
These weaknesses are discussed and suggestions are made
regarding their solution.
BRIAN HUNG gave a seminar on the paper: Green, Paul E., "Protocol
Conversion", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol.
Comm-34, No. 3, March 1986, pp.257-268.
Ann Westine
LINCOLN LAB .Grab=5;
-----------
No internet-related progress to report.
Jim Forgie
LINKABIT .Grab=5;
--------
.IOvr=3;1. I attended the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting on
8-9 April at BRL and presented suggestions on the possible evolution
of EGP (RFC-975) and ideas stemming from my experiments on
multiple-path routing algorithms (RFC-981). I also attended the
Workshop on IS-IS Routing on 24 April at NBS and presented ideas on
routing in the public-network community.
2. Mike Little has suspended work on his network-vulnerability study
report due priority demands on another project. It does not seem
possible to sustain the level of staff committment necessary to
complete this effort, so it is being mothballed until happier times.
3. I refined the requirements document for Internet gateways and
presented it for review and comment at several meetings sponsored by
NSF, DARPA and NBS. Many useful technical suggestions were received
and incorporated in the text, which will soon be submitted as an RFC.
4. Several unruly hosts began firing space junk across the DCnet
Ether. These included a snatch of Martiangrams from net-127 hosts
plus a retch of Atomicgrams (you first heard it here) to the Internet
broadcast address (sic). Although at least the latter space travelers
were destroyed over our DCN-GATEWAY spaceport, we have not been able
to identify their port of embarcation, other than to verify the warp
originated in the FORDnet sector. We did manage to find a Wollongong
bug which resulted in broken CR sequences and bothered a bunch of
hosts, including fuzzballs.
5. An examination of the congestion behavior of the DDCMP links used
in FORDnet and DCnet and planned for use in the NSF Backbone net
revealed occasional deadlocks in which each node in a ring of nodes
waits for buffer space in the next downstream node. While the
deadlock is eventually resolved by timeouts which reset the link
protocol, the behavior can be debilitating and lead to connection
timeout. I decided the time was ripe for some innovative,
preemptive-queueing disciplines and began hacking up the fuzzware to
that purpose. Initial results using a simple discipline that merely
lops off the last customer on the longest queue were very
encouraging. Further experiments based on time-space product,
type-of-service and fancy fairness doctrines are close at hand.
6. Experimental type-of-service routing code was distributed to
FORDnet, UMICHnet, UMDnet and DCnet fuzzballs and is in the process
of being tested. The first experiment is to route interactive TELNET
traffic via relatively low-speed and low-delay direct links between
DCnet and UMDnet and bulk FTP traffic between these nets via
high-speed and high-delay ARPANET/MILNET paths. The next experiment
may be the same trick with the USAN satellite network just coming
online now. .IOvr=0;
Dave Mills
MIT-LCS .Grab=5;
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No internet related progress to report for April.
Lixia Zhang
NTA & NDRE .Grab=5;
----------
No report received.
PROTEON .Grab=5;
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The gateway engineering group moved this month, in several ways.
First, the engineers in the group, who were scattered in free offices
as they joined, moved into a continguous block of space that was
freed for that purpose. Second, we moved from our trusty old PDP11
system to a new VAX system this month. (This means that we now have a
compiler our compiler vendor will support; the PDP11 product is no
longer supported.) The positive effects of all this have been fairly
substantial! Also, as a measure of the increasing complexity and
importance of the gateway effort, we have hired a software
engineering manager to run the gateway project; this will release me
to get back to work on more research oriented network work.
I attended a meeting of the Internet Engineering Group and gave a
presentation of some proposed new ICMP messages to meet some
deficiencies in the interaction of hosts with the network switching
layer; I will be writing this up as soon as I find the time (see
above)!
On the technical front, this month saw more work on a long-standing
missing piece of the CGW; network up/down detection. Interfaces are
periodically tested to make sure that they are still sending and
receiving packets correctly; if not (and also on startup) a
comprehensive self test is run. The protocol forwarding layers are
notified when interfaces change state, and update their routing
tables, etc, accordingly. As a by product of changes to the MOS I/O
system to support this, basic I/O was sped up somewhat!
Also this month, the prototype point-point synchronous interface
finally came up, after a long struggle with the foibles of the Zilog
SCC chip. A pair of these interfaces has been installed on the
MIT-Proteon link for thorough workout, and has been performing
excellently so far. Other sets are being sent out to customers as
field demonstration units. Several new interface projects are
ongoing; we hope to have results to report on them soon.
Noel Chiappa
SRI .Grab=5;
---
.IOvr=4;1. Work continues on preparations for the upcoming network
mobile host demonstration (F9) of the network reconstitution
protocols. Because of the many changes in network topology, various
problems in the handling of redirects in the Unix IP has surfaced in
preliminary testing and are now being investigated. Essentially, the
host will only accept and process REDIRECTs from gateways that
conform to the host's (usually out-of-date) view of which nodes are
up or down.
2. Mike Karels of U.C. Berkeley provided us guidance on UNIX 4.2
host implementation of our reconstitution protocol. We are thankful
for his patience and hospitality. .IOvr=0;
Jim Mathis
As part of the transition of many SRI Sun Workstations to version 3.0
UNIX, we have been verifying, and converting as needed, the operation
of our Multimedia Mail Software. At this point, we have completed
the conversion of MPM, the mail transport module. Part of this
effort included solving the poor performance of MPM on diskless Suns.
This was traced to a problem with host lookup and yellow page
operation. This has been fixed but may require some reordering of
host tables for good performance on diskful systems.
Verifying the operation of MMM, the mail user interface, and its
suite of programs is currently underway. Preliminary results
indicate that no changes will be required for 3.0 compatibility.
On April 1, 1986 we participated with ISI and BBN in a multimedia
conference using video, voice, and computer documents. Although the
systems were not integrated during this initial experiment, much
valuable experience user impressions were collected. As preparation
for the discussion, a message composed of text, and images was sent
to BBN using the SRI MMM system and integrated into Diamond.
SRI is currently developing a MM conferencing prototype that will
take realtime Navy-format messages and integrate them into a
replicated database to be used as the information-base for the
conference. We are currently implementing the module that
willinterpret and transform the information from the Navy messages
into graphics for the shared graphical workspace of the conference.
Earl Craighill
UCL .Grab=5;
---
.IOvr=3;1. We have now established X.400 connectivity with the GIPSI
system in INRIA (The French Institut pour Recherche en Informatique
et Automatique), and we are exchanging messages on a regular basis.
This includes gatewaying into RFC 822, with the address algorithms as
specified in the ARPA/X.400 gatewaying spec (soon to be released as
an RFC).
2. The UCL Butterfly gateway has arrived and is currently in our
basement awaiting installation.
3. An IP-level access control scheme has been implemented in UCL's
SATNET Access Machine in order to extend our control over internet
access by UCL hosts. One reason for this has been the introduction of
logical local nets consisting of student PCs on Ethernets. The SAM's
route table indicates firstly whether or not access control is being
enforced for particular local nets (a net may be a physical LAN or a
logical local net). For those nets being controlled, IP datagrams
passing through the SAM are checked to ensure that the UCL host
concerned has the appropriate permission.
4. Work on upgrading our gateway service LSI-11s with 68000 boards is
progressing. The 68K board now works with the DEQNA Ethernet driver.
TCP, UDP and ARP are all working, while TFTP is nearly finished.
5. Kevin Miles (DEC, Reading, UK) visited UCL and held discussions
with Robert Cole and Peter Lloyd about Transport protocol performance
and the issues in migrating to ISO protocols.
6. Steve Wilbur attended the Privacy task force meeting at BBN
(actually held at the end of March). .IOvr=0;
Peter Lloyd
TASK FORCE REPORTS .PBS;
------------------
APPLICATIONS .Grab=5;
No report received.
END-TO-END SERVICES .Grab=5;
.IOvr=3;1. Steve Deering is making good progess on his initial
implementation of an agent for IP multicasting, as described in
RFC966. He has an initial version of the agent and corresponding
host client code running in the V-System at Stanford. This code
has also been shipped to BBN so they can contemplate its
integration into the IP layer of 4.3BSD, to make it more widely
available.
2. Also at Stanford, Dave Cheriton is working on VMTP, his
proposed transaction protocol which will be efficient enough for
use by distributed operating systems over an LAN. He has a
V-Kernel version "limping" along, and says that the code has
turned out to be "fast, relatively simple, and compact". He has
prepared a paper on VMTP for a forthcoming conference.
3. The Task Force will be meeting at BBN early in May. .IOvr=0;
Bob Braden
INTERNET ARCHITECTURE .Grab=5;
.IOvr=3;1. A third draft of a document on gateway requirements was
circulated for advice and comment in INENG, INARC and the Workshop
on IS-IS Routing held at NBS. Strictly speaking, this is an NSF
document and is being reviewed both as a service to NBS and as
possible guidance for the DoD community.
2. An agenda and marching orders are in place for the first
meeting of INARC to be held at BBN on 8-9 May. Dave Clark has
agreed to attend, as well as Lyman Chapin, who chairs the ANSI
committee charged with routing issues. Marianne Gardner and
possibly others from BBN will summarize their work on advanced
routing issues.
3. Discussion continues over a proposed RFC on ISO addressing
co-authored by Hans-Werner Braun and Ross Callon. This is a legacy
of the now defunct GADS, but may serve as an opening wedge for
more general Dod-ISO convergence issues. .IOvr=0;
Dave Mills
INTERNET ENGINEERING .Grab=5;
.IOvr=3;1) The initial meeting of this Task Force convened during
an open afternoon of the final GADS on January 16, 1986. A
tentative Task Force agenda of short, mid and long term goals was
set.
2) The first full meeting was held on April 8-9, 1986 where the
agenda focused on: .IOvr=0;
- Recent Internet performance degradation
- EGP Modifications
- IP refinements in hosts and gateways for improved routing and
congestion control
3) A summary of recent Internet performance was given: .Grab=8;
Dec 85 Jan 85
Traffic Sent by Mail Bridges ~27 ~35 (Mpackets/week)
Traffic Sent by Mail Bridges ~90 ~105 (Mpackets/week)
Traffic Dropped by Mail Bridges ~3% ~6%
Traffic Dropped by Mail Bridges ~2% ~4%
.IOvr=3;4) BBN discussed two possible sources for these sharp
changes: 1) a bug in the LSI gateway routing software, which was
recently discovered and corrected and 2) resource shortage in the
Mail Bridge PSNs, due to be alleviated by end of April).
6) EGP modifications of two types were discussed: 1) areas in
which the specification needed to be tightened and 2) areas in
which the specification can profitable be `re-interpreted'.
Examples of the second type include fragmented updates and
interpreting the metric (eg, RFC975 - Autonomous Confederations).
7) Several new ICMP messages were proposed to facilitate fault
isolation and routing (eg, initial gateway discovery, discovery of
preferred address for multi-homed hosts). A co-operative
congestion control scheme was proposed. Discussion of this scheme
will continue in the Internet Architecture Task Force. .IOvr=0;
8) Actions in progress:
- continued tracking of Internet traffic for expected
improvements,
- produce RFC of EGP modifications,
- produce RFC specifying host attachment and IP/ICMP
modifications.
.IOvr=3;9) Detailed meeting notes are available upon request to
corrigan@DDN1.ARPA, with cc to gross@MITRE.ARPA. Those requesting
the notes will be added to the Task Force interest list. .IOvr=0;
Phill Gross
INTEROPERABILITY .Grab=5;
No report received.
PRIVACY .Grab=5;
The Privacy Task Force welcomed a new member during the month of
April: Steve Walker of Trusted Technologies, Inc. In response to
a request, background material on ongoing task force discussions
was distributed to John Laws of RSRE. Minutes of the March
meeting are currently being prepared.
John Linn
ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY .Grab=5;
A meeting of the Robustness and Survivability Task Force was held
at SRI-Washington on April 7th. We discussed the impacts of
providing survivability features on new internetwork/network
architectures.
Jim Mathis
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING .Grab=5;
No report received.
SECURITY .Grab=5;
No report received.
TACTICAL INTERNET .Grab=5;
The Tactical Internet task force is tentatively scheduled to meet
on May 27, 1986 at MITRE in McLean VA. The agenda includes
briefings on PR routing across unidirectional links and meteor
burst demonstration activities in support of tactical intelligence
communications. A detailed meeting agenda is in prepara- tion.
Raj Mishra
TESTING AND EVALUATION .Grab=5;
No report received.