<NIS.NSF.NET> [IMR] IMR87-08.TXT
Westine [Page 1]
~
AUGUST 1987
INTERNET MONTHLY REPORTS
------------------------
The purpose of these reports is to communicate to the Internet Research
Group the accomplishments, milestones reached, or problems discovered by
the participating organizations.
This report is for research use only, and is not for public
distribution.
Each organization is expected to submit a 1/2 page report on the first
business day of the month describing the previous month's activities.
These reports should be submitted via network mail to Ann Westine
(Westine@ISI.EDU) or Karen Roubicek (Roubicek@SH.CS.NET)..
BBN LABORATORIES AND BBN COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION
---------------------------------------------------
WIDEBAND NETWORK
A new Wideband Butterfly Gateway was installed at ESD/Mitre in
Bedford, MA on August 7. The gateway connects an ethernet at an
ESD/Mitre testbed facility to the Wideband Network via a
terrestrial T1 circuit terminating at the gateway and at the
Lincoln Laboratory BSAT. This new connectivity has been
established in support of ESD's Technology Validation Experiment
(TVE). The goal of the TVE is to demonstrate that a large
computer-based simulation can be run in a distributed computation
environment provided by Cronus Distributed Operating System
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"clusters" located at RADC and at BBN as well as at ESD/Mitre.
Relatively high bandwidth data paths will be required for the
support of the simulation's wide area intercluster communications.
The Lincoln-ESD/Mitre T1 circuit, along with Wideband Network
connections currently in place at RADC and BBN, will be used to
meet this requirement.
BSAT software Releases 5.4 and 5.5 were distributed to the Wideband
Network sites during the month. The new software supports
simultaneous monitoring of the network by multiple host computers,
an increase in the maximum size of individual channel capacity
reservation requests, and a reservation request throttling
mechanism providing BSAT satellite channel module congestion
control.
The BSAT is being converted to run under Chrysalis Operating System
Release 3.0. Chrysalis 3.0 provides a "RAMFile" system which is
being investigated for potential use in a new BSAT boot procedure.
SATNET
The SATNET remained stable during the month of August. We did
experience problems in the links between the SIMPs and the
Butterfly gateways. The link between the DCEC gateway and the
Roaring Creek SIMP went down on August 14th due to phone line
problems. It remained down until August 17th. Although the CSS
gateway link to the SATNET reported up, European traffic could not
get through. The problem was not detected until the loss of the
DCEC gateway. We are working to try to isolate the problem and
have implemented a check to notify us if it occurs again. This
will allow us to troubleshoot the problem before users are
affected.
Hawley Rising and John Leddy attended a meeting at COMSAT in
Clarksburg Maryland on August 27th. Ken Kay discussed maintenance
of the Linkabit modems.
There is one Linkabit modem that remains to pass acceptance
testing. When the complete shipment is accepted we will be able to
replace the necessary hardware at affected sites.
INTERNET R&D
Our work on the SURAP implementation for the Butterfly Gateway is
proceeding. We have started testing the code with a real LPR.
We are completing a release (3.10) which will fix a number of
outstanding bugs. These include strict source route, Satnet
restart problem, and a Wideband gateway problem. This release
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which will go in all of the Butterfly Gateways and will include
support for fragmented EGP updates. We expect to begun fielding
this release by the middle of September.
Bob Hinden (Hinden@BBN.COM)
ISI
---
Internet Concepts Project
Greg Finn continues to work on the vulnerability of dynamic
computer network protocols.
One RFC was published this month.
RFC 1000: Reynolds, J.K. and J. Postel "The Request for
Comments Reference Guide", August 1987.
Ann Westine (Westine@ISI.EDU)
Multimedia Conferencing Project
Brian Hung is working on a conferencing mode of his IBM-PC
scanner program, i.e., one that would allow a user to send
bitmap messages to a destination during a conference. This
version of Brian's program would require the incorporation of
TFTP into his main Pascal program. Brian is currently
attempting to do this via an assembly language routine. This
routine would call the MS DOS Exec function call to invoke
TFTP.
Brian Hung (Hung@ISI.EDU)
We are working on extending the packet video conferencing
system from a point-to-point connection between two sites to
be a multipoint connection among two or more sites. An
interim version of the ST conferencing protocol has been
implemented in the Packet Video Program; BBN has implemented
the Voice Funnel side of the protocol. Testing is underway.
Since there are only two copies of the prototype packet video
hardware, initial testing will simulate three-site video by
having one site connect back to itself while also connected to
the second site. A fake video source will be used to test
other aspects of the system. In the fall we plan to convert
to commercial video hardware so that more than two systems can
be installed.
Steve Casner (Casner@ISI.EDU)
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NSFNET Project
Bob Braden organized and attended a Technical Workshop hosted
by the Cornell Theory Center on August 26, 27, and 28. This
workshop was specifically limited to technical personnel
responsible for the various middle-level networks of NSFNET;
its purpose was to pass on to the attendees as much
information as possible about how to run a network within
NSFNET. The 40 attendees included technical personnel from
BARRNET, MERIT, MIDNET, NCAR, NCSA, NORTHWESTNET, NYSERNET,
PSCNET, SDSCNET, SESQUINET, SURANET, and WESTNET. We were
extremely fortunate to have the two Internet notables Vint
Cerf and Dave Mills among our speakers. Other major
contributors to the class were Hans-Werner Braun, Mike Petry,
Scott Brim, Mark Fedor, and Bob Braden. Featured in the
program were detailed discussions about problem diagnosis,
GATED, and routing issues. Marty Schoffstall and Jeff Case
presented a demonstration of preliminary SGMP implementations.
At ISI, internal testing of the background file transfer
program (BFTP) continued. This resulted in the implementation
of a number of improvements and several bug fixes. Work on
the RFC continues.
We also started work on a general tool for gathering
comprehensive statistics at the Backbone and regional network
nodes, for use in future management and engineering of the
various components. We plan to exploit the use of Ethernets
as the standard interconnection medium between NSFNET levels,
by gathering statistics using Statistical Agent hosts which
are monitoring these Ethernets promiscuously. The first
version is being implemented on a SUN workstation, but we plan
to implement a later version in PC's. To support high packet
rates, these Statistical Agent hosts may have to be dedicated
to the statistics function.
In addition to the Statistical Agent hosts, one per
interconnection node, there will be a central Statistical
Collector program which queries the agents periodically and
maintains a long-term database. By gathering the data outside
the actual gateways, we expect to be able to provide
comprehensive statistics at all protocol levels, without
adding to the CPU or memory load on the gateways. The
collection mechanism is being designed to be dynamically
configurable and easily extensible, using an object-oriented
approach.
Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon (Braden@ISI.EDU and
DeSchon@ISI.EDU)
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Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project
Alan Katz continued to experiment with DEC's Xt X-Windows
Toolkit. Alan was able to get a their new version of xterm
which was supplied with the toolkit running on both the VAX
and the Suns (there was a bug which prevented it from running
on a Sun). Alan Katz has been writing a variety of small
utility programs using the toolkit to improve his X-Windows
user environment. Alan visited people at NASA Ames research
center in San Jose, CA, Aug 3rd, about the possiblity of
establishing a Wideband-Net link to the NAS Cray 2's.
Alan Katz (Katz@ISI.EDU)
As August drew to a close, a new version of the Wideband Net
BSAT software was released that removes the limit of 2^14
channel symbols per frame for aggregation of datagrams to be
transmitted. This should allow us to test NETBLT again and
achieve rates above 1Mb/s.
Steve Casner (Casner@ISI.EDU)
MIT-LCS
-------
The current NETBLT protocol implementation has now been tested over
the ARPANET with success. Strict source routing was used to
generate several paths across the ARPANET from MIT to USC-ISI and
back again, with throughputs averaging 16,000 bits per second and
peaking at 19,000 bits per second. The tests were conducted at
several times during the day: 10AM EDT, 11AM EDT, 12N EDT, and 5PM
EDT. Network round-trip delay and packet loss rates were quite
high during some tests; NETBLT was nevertheless able to provide
high throughput, demonstrating again that NETBLT can provide high
performance over many network types.
Lixia Zhang (LIXIA@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU)
MITRE Corporation
No report received.
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NTA & NDRE
----------
No report received.
SRI
---
Multimedia Conferencing/Wideband Network
The first demonstration of EMCE (Experimental Multimedia
Conferencing Environment) over the Wideband SATNET took
place between ISI and SRI on August 18, 1987. Keith
Williams and Steve Casner, at ISI, talked with Ruth Lang,
at SRI, for approximately one hour with no breaks in
communication. All aspects of the conferencing tool were
successfully exercised.
End-to-end packet delays were approximately one second,
mostly due to the satellite transport. Voice quality was
as good as using the Ethernet alone.
Ruth Lang (ruth@tsca.istc.sri.com)
Keith Williams (keith@tsca.istc.sri.com)
Distributed Applications
Replicated Databases
The TACTICS II distributed system (the system we first reported
last month, which is under the ADCCP project sponsored by CECOM)
supports reliable replication in spite of internetwork
partitioning. In the case of partitioning, replication is
accomplished automatically upon reconstitution. The current
mechanism for replication is based on queueing of database
updates with a primary site responsible for replicating
information to other databases. This design clearly suffers
from being vulnerable to single points of failure, namely the
primary site and its queues. We are currently investigating
alternative replication mechanisms less vulnerable to single
points of failure. The investigation focuses on the use of
optimistic replication strategies for database updates and
semantic-based consistency techniques. This alternative design
aims at achieving real-world consistency, vesus time-sequence
consistency, of database information.
Resource management
The TACTICS II resource monitor is used as an integral part
of a testing facility for experimenting the TACTICS II system
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in several internet configurations. An experiment was conducted
over packet radio and local area networks. The goal of the
experiment was to demonstrate the feasibility and capabilities
of testing distributed system designs and implementations in
an internetwork environment. The resource monitor was used
to collect traffic, usage pattern and the like real-time
information of the networks, the experimental hosts, and the
services on those hosts. The data collected by the resource
monitor was stored and displayed along with other system
information over the course of the experiment.
Joan Wrabetz (wrabetz@spam.istc.sri.com)
UCL
---
Work on a learning system for protocol performance tuning is well
under way, with a simple learning shell now being tried out on some
TCP parameters and a simple model of the internet. The intention is
to glue this to the 4.3BSD TCP and compare empirical with simulated
results.
John Crowcroft (jon@NSS.CS.UCL.AC.UK)
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
----------------------
1. Development continues on the Dissimilar Gateway Protocol
(DGP). Mike Little and I worked out a DGP model based on the
constraints of existing host and gateway implementations and
another model based on selected changes to these
implementations.
2. A driver for the ACC 5250 X.25 interface was constructed for
the fuzzball and installed on the swamp.arpa gateway. The
intent of this implementation is to measure the overheads and
loss rates of the DDN Standard X.25 protocol in actual
service, as well as assess the performance of the ACC hardware
itself.
3. I helped Steve Casner of ISI bring up a new WWVB clock, which
is now ticking at 128.9.2.129. There are now two WWVB
reference clocks in the western US (NCAR and ISI) and two in
the eastern US (M/A-COM and UMD), as well as a GOES reference
clock (Ford) and assorted WWV clocks (UMich, UDel). The San
Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) threatens to bring up
another WWVB clock as well.
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4. Some digging into the time-synchronization mechanisms of AT&T
and other common carriers disclosed interesting parallels
between their network- synchronization systems and the ad-hoc
systems now budding in the Internet. I am working on a report
discussing these issues and how Internet clocks can be further
improved.
5. I continued to watch the NSFNET Backbone for throughput and
loss data. Problems with primary/fallback routes continue to
bother the system.
6. Mike Minnich, having attacked several megabytes of performance
data harvested from the NSFNET Backbone, captured further
megabytes of performance date from the BBN LSI-11 gateway
weekly traffic reports. Mike is developing flow equations in
order to measure overheads, mean flight paths and other
statistics useful to assess the performance of the routing and
congestion-control algorithms.
7. I presented a briefing for the NSFNET Road Show at Cornell on
26-27 August and prepared a paper on the NSFNET Backbone
network for the ACM SIGCOM Symposium on 11-13 August.
Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU)
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NSF NETWORKING
--------------
NSF NETWORKING
UCAR/BBN LABS NSF NETWORK SERVICE CENTER (NNSC)
Craig Partridge presented a paper on round-trip time estimation and
spoke in a session on NSFNET at the SIGCOMM conference. The
implementation of the HEMS agent software (for network management)
is currently being debugged.
Approximately 2500 copies of the NSF Network News have been
distributed.
By Karen Roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net)
NSFNET BACKBONE SITES
CORNELL UNIVERSITY THEORY CENTER
Backbone Operations
Sixty-four million packets were delivered by the backbone in August
-- double what we delivered in May. We couldn't have done this
well without heroic and ingenious software efforts by Dave Mills to
deal with congestion (as described in the paper he and Hans-Werner
Braun gave at SIGCOMM). Also, the software in the fuzzballs now
allows for 120 networks in the routing table and multi-packet
routing updates.
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Statistics (from Doug Elias):
Total Traffic Figures
Between Routers Ethernet
Input 100067210 60405859
Output 98589040 64139840
In+Out 198656250 124545699
Grand 323201949
Traffic Delivered to Ethernets
min mean max total %
PSC 1452 24276.22 63819 16969080 25.44 *
Cornell 282 11321.60 197799 7913799 11.87 *
JvNC 1364 29185.45 93200 21101079 31.64 *
NCAR 82 12647.67 53718 8840724 13.26 *
SDSC 4 3645.39 22760 2548131 3.82
SURA 0 3657.52 29752 2552946 3.83 *
NCSA 682 9681.01 39906 6767027 10.15
Overall 66692786 100.00
The "*" indicates statistics based on data containing
"missing observations"; these cause the mean to be
artifically elevated, but by no more than ~2%.
By Scott Brim (swb@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu)
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
We lost a delni into which the fuzzball and vitalink stuff were
plugged. For some amount of time (ending at 1627Z) all connections
to campus from NSFNET and Uchicago, Indiana University, and
Northwestern and between those schools and NSFNET was unavailable.
By Ed Krol (krol@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu)
JOHN VON NEUMANN NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER
This report is designed to inform the JVNC Consortium and JVNCNET
network members as well as the Internet community of monthly status
of the JVNCNET network.
The data used on this report is collected using a number of
techniques developed at JVNC, together with data from the JVNC
operations group. The NSFNET data is obtained from the NSFNET NOC
(Network Operations Center).
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NETWORK BRIEF:
JVNCNET has the configuration of a "tree". The 13 Consortium
Universities*, together with the 3 NRAC** schools form the 16 node
network. The gateways are 15 VAX's and 6 Ungermann Bass (UB)
routers, connected by 9 T1 lines, 5 56kbps lines and 2 satellite
links. Locally at JVNC (center of the JVNCNET network), JVNCA (a
VAX8600 running ULTRIX) serves as major router, primary name server
for domain "csc.org" and primary network monitoring system, JVNCB
(a VAX750, ULTRIX)is also a gateway, finally we utilize a dedicated
UB router to connect to the NRAC group.
NETWORK STATISTICS DATA:
The network monitoring statistics are performed from "jvnca", and
are affected by its down time. In order to compensate for this we
multiply (in our analysis below), the numbers with the percentage
of down time of jvnca thus representing the worst case. We plan to
overcome this situation with the next release of the JVNC
monitoring package (see "Network Monitoring Project" below).
The network is polled every 10 minutes with "icmp-echo" packets,
and the analysis of the data is performed on this data. The data
is processed using information on the "scheduled down time table"
for the systems. Therefore, if a gateway is scheduled to be down,
its information is not computed during that time, whether the
gateway is operational or not.
The special configuration of this network together with the fact
that we use different subnets for the point to point links allows
us to determine very accurately the reachability for the gateways.
When we receive an alarm that one node/gateway is unreachable, we
proceed to determine whether the node is down or any other
component of the the link is non functional. This information is
not affected much by the routing.
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TABLE I, Gateways Reachability/Link Status
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Created: Sun Aug 30 21:38:23 1987
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
node meanttr maxttr meantbf sched Up Dwn avail perf
min min min % % % %
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
ias 197 467 1030 2 93 6 93 95
mit 43 43 1446 0 99 0 99 96
nyu 43 43 1446 0 99 0 99 98
njit 71 310 1257 1 98 1 98 96
brown 24 43 1349 0 99 0 99 99
umdnj 78 280 1204 1 98 1 98 90
arizona 80 570 1009 1 97 2 97 97
harvard 43 43 1446 0 99 0 99 90
rutgers 19 20 1092 0 99 0 99 99
stevens 71 310 1257 2 98 1 98 96
colorado 26 43 1383 2 99 0 99 93
columbia 244 1429 1006 0 88 11 88 88
princeton 121 650 1105 0 97 2 97 97
rochester 30 59 1269 0 99 0 99 95
u_of_penn 41 40 1381 0 99 0 99 99
penn_state 275 539 1337 0 96 3 96 96
jvncb.csc.org 19 43 1299 3 99 0 99 99
Total test time (min): 33303
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Header definitions of table I are:
nodename: the gateway or host on JVNC-NET network (128.121)
meanttr: in minutes, the mean time to recover from the "down" state
to the "up" state. Where "down" state is when the result
of sending "icmp-echo" packets is no packets return, and
the "up" state is when we receive packets back. Each test
is performed 10 times, every 10 minutes, and averaged each
time.
maxttr: in minutes, the maximum time to recover, from the "down"
state to the "up" state (see above).
meantbf: in minutes, the mean time between failures.
sched_down time: in percent, is the time the gateways/hosts were
"scheduled" to be down, respect to the total time
of test.
avail: in percent, is the time for which the gateways were
available ("up" state) respect to the total time of
test minus the scheduled down time).
perform: in percent, is the figure of merit that considers the
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number of packets lost and the available time.
ANALYSIS:
The data of Table I is a product of the gateways availability together
with lines/satellite status (this last including the communications
equipment such as T1 muxes, CSU/DSU, etc). The following is broken down
in gateways and links ( lines and satellite).
1.- Gateways Availability:
Considering that "jvnca" was up 97.87% of the time, and the node that
was unavailable for the longest time (while jvnca was up) was Columbia,
with 88%, then we can safely say that Columbia was up at least 86.13% of
the time, representing the worst case on the network. In the average,
the gateways were up and available at least 95.24% of the time (worst
case).
Table II, Gateways Availability
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
gateway node problems
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
jvnca JVNC buffer starvation, power hit, gated
jvncb JVNC power hit, gated
fuzzball JVNC power hit, upgrade of fuzzware
jvax ARIZONA power problems in Arizona
jvnc-njit JVNC software upgrade
njit-jvnc NJIT software upgrade
njit-umdnj NJIT software upgrade
njit-stevens NJIT software upgrade
umdnj-njit UMDNJ software upgrade
stevens-njit STEVENS software upgrade, routing-rip
iasvax IAS construction work in IAS
psugate PENN STATE routing-gated
hucsc HARVARD routing-routed
super-fs RUTGERS storm related power failure
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2.- Lines Status:
Table III, Line Status
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
from to type problem
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
JVNC PENN STATE T1 T1 mux hang
JVNC ROCHESTER 56kbps AT&T problem upstate NY
JVNC PRINCETON T1 T1 mux lost power unit
JVNC COLUMBIA 56kbps flaky line, AT&T
JVNC U. OF PENN T1 glitch on line took route down
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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3.- Satellite Nodes Status:
Table IV, Satellite nodes Status
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
from to type problem
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
JVNC ARIZONA 56k sat. bad weather
JVNC COLORADO 56k sat. bad weather
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.- Traffic:
The traffic that transits JVNCNET is a combination of JVNC supercomputer
traffic and traffic "in transit". The JVNC supercomputer traffic is
the one that has the JVNC front ends (jvncc, jvncd or jvncf) as
source/ destination, while the traffic in transit is the rest. The total
traffic is:
T = traffic on subnet 50 (T1) + traffic on subnet 51 (T2) +
+ traffic between the MIT node and the Harvard node (T3) * +
+ traffic between the MIT node and the Brown node (T4) * +
+ traffic between the NJIT node and the Stevens node (T5)* +
+ traffic between the NJIT node and the UMDNJ node (T6) *
where:
T1 = ( jvnca + jvncb + jvncc + jvnc-njit + colo + jvax + fuzzball +
+ term-serv)|subnet 50
T2 = ( jvnca + jvncd + jvncf + picasso + monet + iris + term-serv1 +
+ term-serv2 + term-serv3)|subnet 51
T3 = |coventry|subnet_3 - coventry|subnet_9|
T4 = |coventry|subnet_3 - coventry|subnet_10|
T5 = |njit-jvnc - njit-stevens|
T6 = |njit-jvnc - njit-umdnj|
* traffic not seen on subnet 50
Until now, we have been reporting |T1|max (see above) which is the
maximum value of T1_input and T1_output (the reason for the difference
in values is simply that we are not gathering information for all the
hosts/gateways). This month's count is:
number of packets on subnet 50 (one direction, T1) > 105,948,605
===========
Note that this is a 60% increase respect of last month.
---
The data is collected from jvnca, jvncb and JVNC_fuzzball every 10
minutes automatically and compiled each month. The data from Colo,
JVAX, jvnc-njit is only partial. The data for jvncc and the terminal
server on subnet 50 is not present. Note that this figure would be
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largely incremented if we would consider jvncc's statistics as well.
Table V, Traffic on JVNCNET (subnet 50 only)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
local gateway packets in packets out comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
JVNCA 40,312,393 48,900,159 accurate
JVNCB 28,275,959 33,306,302 accurate
COLO 1,117,953 5,691,597 only last 18 days
JVAX 111,463 231,809 only 7 days
JVNC FUZZ 18,536,320 15,812,886 accurate
JVNCC - - not available
JVNC-NJIT 3,850,500 2,005,852 only 23 days
TERM SERV - - not available
total ........ 92,204,588 105,948,605
------------------------------------------------------------------------
5.- PSN Status:
Still no news from DCA when they will connect. Everything is ready.
6.- Routing:
UB routers:
new version of the software, RIP between UB routers and "external"
gateways replace previous routing reachability via EGP between JVNCB and
the JVNC-NJIT router.
VAXs:
new version of gated, hello protocol running in broadcast form between
local VAXs and the fuzzball has SOLVED the route flapping due to the ptp
helloers and RIP broadcasts.
7.- Comments:
The network routing has behaved better this month, after the upgrade of
gated. The routing on the dedicated routers has improved too with the
new code allowing for more dynamic routing as well as more control. The
traffic has increased at least 60%. And the uptime for the systems has
remained high. The projects are moving ahead.
PROJECTS:
1.- Network Monitoring:
Status: On going
The network monitoring package "netmon" has been designed to provide
JVNCNET with the tools to quickly determine a network problem in our
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environment. This package has been in constant evolution as we
have learned more on its limitations and the needs for monitoring.
Today the so called "phase I" is completed and the program is fully
operational.
Still, "phase II" is on its way, to provide for new functions like
the concept of "primary" and "secondary" monitoring center, at the
same time "phase II" will allow for portability of the code, this
will satisfy some of the JVNC Consortium's requests for copies of
the program for their local use. Unfortunately we can only support
the code for local use due to staff limitations.
We are also looking very attentively at the efforts of the IETF's
gateway monitoring group (chaired by Craig Partridge), and we'll
follow their recommendations to enhance our monitoring facilities.
2.- Network Characterization:
Status: On going The Network Characterization program is directed
towards determining the parameters that characterize the JVNCNET
network's diverse type of services. This effort will be utilized
not only as a research subject but to find/predict network
bottlenecks and problems before they are obvious to the end users.
This task started two weeks ago with the collection of data and the
automation of the collection, and will continue with the study of
the characteristics and patterns that distinguish each point to
point lines whether T1, 56kpbs or satellite. The results will be
available to the community.
3.- Traffic Analysis:
Status: On going
The traffic data is currently being collected from JVNCA, JVNCB,
and the fuzzball automatically. This will be extended to the other
VAXs on the same ethernet and the other routers on the network. At
the same time the data will be compiled per campus.
INFORMATION:
JVNCNET NOC: "net@jvnca.csc.org"
(JVNCNET Network Operations Center)
JVNCNET manager: "heker@jvnca.csc.org"
* CSC Consortium: Princeton University, MIT, Harvard, Brown,
University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, IAS, Columbia, University of
Rochester, NYU, Penn State, University of Arizona, University of
Colorado.
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** NRAC (Newark Remote Access): New Jersey Institute of Technology
(NJIT), Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Medicine and
Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ).
By Sergio Heker (heker@jvnca.csc.org)
NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH AND UNIVERSITY SATELLITE
NETWORK PROJECT
Preliminary statistics show that the pass-through traffic on USAN
(i.e., traffic not destined for NCAR) is about 60%. Further
breakdowns of the traffic flows will be made with the recently
acquired Excelan Lanalyser.
With the exception of the one host (the only host) on USAN,
windom.ucar.edu (which runs gated), Wisconsin, and the NSFNET
fuzzball, the USAN/UCAR nets use static routing. We plan to phase
out static routing by bringing up each gateway it turn with dynamic
routing.
The planned USAN/Institute for Naval Oceanography connection has
been postponed until at least FY 88. The USAN/Naval Research Lab
connection is scheduled for September 20.
By Don Morris (morris@scdsw1.ucar.edu)
PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER
Our Fuzzball has had no downtime except for one reboot for a new
version on August 5 and one short line outage. The fuzzball has
been passing on the order of half a million packets daily to the
local net.
PSC Gateway was also up the entire month, forwarding nearly 1.25
million packets daily. The newest configuration and newest version
of gated have been running since August 20.
A new PSN arrived here on August 3, and its installation was
completed by BBN on August 5. A satellite dish and associated
equipment have also been delivered but are not yet installed.
Lines have been ordered, but these too have not yet been installed.
By Dave O'Leary (oleary@morgul.psc.ed)
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SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER
Our PSN (IMP #26) was installed during the month. At this time it
has no trunk connections; neither VSAT (U Wisc) nor terrestrial
(ISI, UCLA, NASA/AMES).
The T1 microwave link to the Salk Inst. (p4200 to p4200) is now
operational. It is running version 7.3 and supports both TCP/IP and
DECNET. While we are looking forward to 7.4 to correct a few
"hitches" in the DECNET support, by and large we are pleased with
the link.
The link with BARRNET (at UC Berkley) is in place and tested. It
will be turned up on Tuesday, 8 Sept. This is also a p4200 to
p4200 connection. JPL has elected to use this as their path to
SDSC (and NSFNET). The use of an existing 9.6 line between JPL and
SDSC, mentioned 2 months ago will not be used.
We have received our GATED configuration file from Cornell and it
is now running on a SUN 3/50. It will be transferred to a VAX (SRI
Multinet) with the next release from SRI - this will bring the SRI
version of GATED inline with Cornell's.
Our Pacer/Kinetics-SC combination is now stable - ~60 MAC's will be
coming online via Ethernet over the next 2 weeks.
Locally, work is progressing on IP traffic over SDSCNET links. We
also have UDP services working to our Cray.
DEC has delivered the VAX 8250 and DMB32C for our VAX-BI/Cray-CTSS
development.
By Paul Love (loveep@sds.sdsc.edu)
NSFNET REGIONAL AFFILIATED & CONSORTIUM NETWORKS
BARRNET
Missed report for July as Tom Ferrin was too busy to take his turn
at writing it. Little or no new activity in August, lots of people
on vacation. UC Berkeley split its 112kb link to SDSC in
preparation for activation of BARRNET-NSFNET link into Berkeley
using one of the two 56kb paths. The connection will be tested in
early September. It will be assigned (tentatively) class C address
192.31.52.xx.
We continue to operate all BARRNET links at 1.5+Mb rate on T-1
facilities but are experiencing high error rates on one (UC owned)
microwave link (UC Berkeley to UC San Francisco) and began near
month end to experience high error rates on the telco supplied UC
Santa Cruz - Stanford link which had been very clean for previous
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month. UC plans replacement of the current microwave equipmentin
the San Francisco link which is a T1C channel with a mux which
takes special diagnostic equipment for trouble shooting more
difficult. The Santa Cruz link problem is being studied. A T-1
BERT tester is a necessity, but even that is of limited help with
the "high capacity" telco facilities in the path (44+Mb/s fiber).
We interfaced Grafpoint Tektronix 4xxx graphics terminal emulator
package to the Stanford version of PC/IP for direct graphic output
from the Cray at NASA via telnet. The Stanford Mac/IP package
v.2.0p is now in production in many sites and runs on Mac2's as
well as 512s, Plus and SE.
BARRNET Consortium and Technical Subcommittee meetings are
scheduled for September. A key subject of discussion will be
network expansion and new members. There are about half a dozen
sites which have expressed a desire to connect and the network
operation is nearing sufficient stability to entertain such
expansion.
By Bill Yundt (gd.why@forsythe.stanford.edu)
JVNCNET (Refer to JVNNSC backbone report)
MERIT (No report received)
MIDNET
As of the end of August nine of the twelve MIDNET links were up and
running. The other three links are waiting for delivery of the
CSU/DSU's that connect the phone lines to the routers.
Unfortunately, two of the remaining links are the ones into our
backbone connection, NCSA.
By Doug Gale (doug@unlcdc3.bitnet)
NORTHWESTNET (No report received)
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NYSERNET
As of 1 August 1987, NYSERNET had the following topology:
Clarkson
Syracuse--+ |
| |
Rochester--------Cornell---------RPI---Albany
| | |
Buffalo...Fredonia | |
| | |
Binghamton | +-------- | ------StonyBrook
| | | |
| | | |
CUNY--NYTEL/NSMAC--Columbia------NYU-+
| |\ | | | /| |
| | \ NYTEL/GC | NYNEX/S&T / | |
| | \ BNL / | |
| | \ / | |
| | +-------------Rockefeller | |
| | | |
| +------------------------------+ |
| |
+-------------POLY-------------------+
C.NYSER.NET was enabled as a root domain server as part of the
"2nd-root" group with Maryland and NASA. After a testing period
these machines should be moved into the set of official root domain
servers.
A number of NYSERNET people participated in the NSFNET workshop at
Cornell. Live demo's of SGMP were show for UNIX, MSDOS and
Proteon's gateway.
By Marty Schoffstall (schoff@nic.nyser.net)
SDSCNET (Refer to SDSC backbone report)
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SESQUINET
The complete initially proposed configuration of SesquiNet has been
installed and in operation for a full month now. As a consequence,
the following campus networks are being served and being advertised
via EGP to the core:
Baylor College of Medicine 128.249
Houston Area Research Center 192.31.87
Rice University 128.42
Texas A&M University 128.194
Texas Southern University 192.31.101
and the University of Houston 129.7
Although the network is lightly loaded, we have still experienced
no hardware or software failures of our gateways.
Work is continuing on the connection from NSFNET/NCAR to
SesquiNet/Rice via fuzzballs at the two sites.
We are now using recent cisco support for the Hello routing
protocol. This allows SesquiNet's cisco gateway at Rice to
dynamically advertise its campus networks to our ARPANET/NSFNET
fuzzball gateway.
We have monitored network operation during the month of August, and
will soon be analyzing it to compute our MTBF and MTTR.
By Guy Almes (almes@rice.edu)
SURANET
The dates for the installation of the new SURANET data lines as
presently projected, by the carriers, are as follows:
U of Virginia to CEBAF- Sept 11
U of Maryland to U of Virginia- Sept 15
NSF to Georgetown U- Sept 16
U of Alabama at Birmingham to U of Alabama at Tuscaloosa- Sept 16
Georgetown U to Catholic U- Sept 16
Catholic U to Gallaudet- Sept 16
Gallaudet to George Washington U- Sept 16
George Washington U to George Mason U- Sept 16
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CEBAF to William and Mary- Sept 16
U of Maryland to Johns Hopkins U- Sept 16
Vanderbilt U to U of Tennessee- Sept 16
U of Maryland to U of Florida- Sept 21
Florida State U to Louisiana State U- Sept 25
University of Alabama at Birmingham to Louisiana State University- Sept 25
TUCC to CEBAF- Sept 25
Three additional Federal Agencies are planning to connect to
SURANET through the University of Maryland. They are: the National
Institutes of Health, the National Bureau of Standards and the
Naval Research Laboratory.
By Jack Hahn (hahn%umdc.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu)
WESTNET
1. cisco has been finalized as the vendor for IP Routers.
2. We are soliciting bids for CSU/DSUs.
3. NCAR is advertising Supernet (the Colorado network) to NSFNET.
4. Four Westnet technical representatives attended the Cornell TCP/IP
workshop, and found it to be excellent.
5. We are still waiting for our FY'87 funding from NSF, which is
expected about 9/15/87. After the funding is in, we will order
equipment for the three New Mexico schools, and the University of
Wyoming, as these sites will have circuits provided as cost sharing.
By Pat Burns (pburns%csugreen.bitnet)
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TASK FORCE REPORTS
------------------
APPLICATIONS - USER INTERFACE
Nothing much to report. Chris Schmandt has prepared a
(strawman of the) strawman voice server specification for
submission to the 2nd Conference on Computer Workstations; it
will be available soon to interested parties. The next
meeting of the task force has been rescheduled to October 20-
21, still in Cambridge.
Charlotte I. Tubis (tubis@purdue.edu)
AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS
The Autonomous Networks Task Force will meet in Boston
November 5-6. Representatives from the ICCB and ANSI Working
Group on Routing Architectures will attend to discuss research
issues of mutual interest.
Deborah Estrin (estrin@OBERON.USC.EDU)
END-TO-END SERVICES
No progress to report this month.
Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU)
INTERNET ARCHITECTURE
An announcement for the next INARC meeting workshop is in the
works. The current plan is to hold this meeting in the
Washington, DC, area in early November.
Dave Mills (Mills@HUEY.UDEL.EDU)
INTERNET ENGINEERING
No report received.
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INTERNET MANAGEMENT
The chairman of this task force met with and briefed the
results of the May 87 meeting to Dr. Gordon Bell, Director of
the Computing, Information Science and Engineering Division of
NSF. A subset of this material is to be provided to Dr. Jack
Schwartz, the new director of DARPA, Information Systems
Technology Office on 9 Sept.
Vint Cerf (Cerf@A.ISI.EDU)
PRIVACY
No reportable Privacy Task Force progress occurred during
August.
John Linn (Linn@CCY.BBN.COM)
ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY
No report received.
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING
1. Three white papers are currently in preparation and are hoped
to be completed in draft form by the end of September. These
will cover high bandwidth requirements, user interface, and
equation standards.
2. NASA has initiated a program, called the Telescience Testbed
Pilot Program, to use a rapid-prototyping user-oriented
testbed approach to develop requirements and explore potential
design concepts in support of telescience. It is expected
that this program will provide considerable input to the task
force. For further information, contact Maria Gallagher
(Testbed Coordinator) at Maria@riacs.edu.
3. The task force meeting tentatively scheduled for September has
been postponed to allow completion of the draft white papers.
Barry Leiner (leiner@ICARUS.RIACS.EDU)
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SECURITY
No report received.
TACTICAL INTERNET
No report received.
TESTING AND EVALUATION
No report received.
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