<NIS.NSF.NET> [IMR] IMR87-11.TXT
Westine [Page 1]
~
NOVEMBER 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 distri-
bution.
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
BSAT Releases 6.1 and 6.2 were distributed to the Wideband Network
sites this month. These releases primarily consisted of minor bug
fixes. In addition, the operational BSAT software is now capable
of supporting up to twelve Wideband sites.
Work has started on the development of a faster and more reliable
booting mechanism for the BSATs. This mechanism will exploit the
Butterfly "RAMFile" capability distributed with Chrysalis Operating
System Release 3.0. With the addition of non-volatile Multibus RAM
Westine [Page 1]
Internet Monthly Report November 1987
hardware to the BSAT, the RAMFile facility can be used to cache
BSAT application and Chrysalis operating system software and
critical BSAT state through complete system reboots, including
reboots resulting from site power outages. RAMFile-based booting
is expected to reduce the required BSAT boot time from about 20
minutes to less than one minute.
SATNET
The SATNET continues to perform well. Roaring Creek, Tanum and
Goonhilly had an availability of 99% from tests run at ISI.
Fucino's availability was lower, 97%, due to a PSP outage early in
the month which took the site off the air.
The upgrade of the line between RSRE and UCL to 64 Kbps Kilostream
service has been delayed. We are still waiting for the line to be
installed between the two sites by BT. When a completion date for
the installation of the line has been determined, we will
reschedule the upgrade of the gateway hardware.
INTERNET RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
The EGP servers on the ARPANET were upgraded to DEC LSI 11/73's
during November. The results have been wonderful. The ARPANET
overall average round trip delay (for 1300-1700 EST on 11/24) as
compared with a month earlier went from 1474msec to 442msec. The
average round trip delays to the IMP's with the EGP servers went
from 9033msec to 413msec.
The total internode throughput went from 379 Kbps to 468 Kbps. For
comparison, the 4-hour average is substantially greater than the
413 kbps total internode throughput for the peak hour in a 5-
working-day CUMstats collection in August. At that time that was
the largest throughput ever recorded for a single hour for the
ARPANET.
Another result of the upgrade was a dramatic reduction in the
datagram drop rates of the ARPANET EGP servers and the DDN
Mailbridges. Note that AERO, MINET, and YUMA, which are the MILNET
EGP servers have not been upgraded. We hope to do this in
December.
AERO MINET YUMA BBN2 ISI PURDUE
11/12 6.56% 4.48% 6.63% 12.33% 14.25% 7.84%
11/13 0.90% 0.62% 5.06% 5.21% 12.81% 3.73%
11/14 0.40% 0.13% 2.70% 2.34% 7.32% 3.65%
11/15 0.25% 0.24% 2.61% 1.44% 5.95% 3.39%
11/16 1.14% 0.90% 5.68% 3.53% 10.80% 2.73%
11/17 1.50% 1.46% 8.96% 3.08% 9.32% 3.17%
11/18 1.12% 0.54% 11.85% 4.23% 9.85% 2.79%
11/19 1.78% 0.89% 11.01% 2.48% 5.97% 3.75%
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
11/20 3.55% 1.13% 12.39% 2.29% 3.34% 4.95%
11/21 3.33% 0.42% 9.81% 0.75% 1.54% 0.92%
11/22 2.65% 0.68% 7.78% 1.33% 1.37% 2.17%
11/23 2.84% 0.86% 12.77% 1.42% 2.76% 2.93%
11/24 4.28% 1.21% 12.99% 1.74% 2.21% 2.10%
11/25 6.08% 1.39% 11.76% 1.56% 0.72% 1.45%
11/26 4.05% 0.36% 5.37% 0.70% 0.49% 0.72%
MILARP MILBBN MILDCE MILISI MILLBL MILSAC MILSRI
11/12 20.04% 11.56% 7.89% 14.47% 3.01% 5.25% 6.50%
11/13 16.30% 11.22% 5.66% 22.20% 1.08% 5.10% 6.90%
11/14 12.80% 5.48% 2.34% 13.15% 7.36% 1.97% 1.45%
11/15 14.21% 4.46% 2.05% 9.00% 12.10% 2.37% 1.21%
11/16 23.58% 12.88% 9.08% 15.60% 1.67% 3.97% 4.92%
11/17 26.62% 11.59% 5.01% 12.34% 1.42% 6.09% 3.65%
11/18 28.24% 13.63% 7.04% 13.01% 1.97% 3.25% 4.10%
11/19 18.34% 8.23% 6.63% 6.33% 1.32% 1.71% 3.88%
11/20 4.97% 7.31% 9.50% 6.34% 0.27% 2.08% 6.03%
11/21 2.51% 1.74% 3.98% 0.68% 0.27% 1.00% 0.50%
11/22 1.78% 1.36% 1.91% 0.31% 0.20% 0.79% 0.40%
11/23 9.29% 4.57% 5.06% 1.02% 0.95% 3.23% 3.18%
11/24 8.94% 4.69% 2.99% 3.00% 0.58% 3.65% 1.44%
11/25 9.44% 3.25% 3.08% 2.57% 0.75% 4.08% 1.85%
11/26 4.99% 1.94% 2.99% 1.53% 0.94% 1.10% 0.57%
Many thanks to Mike Petry at UMD who supplied two of the DEC LSI-
11/73.
Robert Hinden (Hinden@PARK-STREET.BBN.COM)
ISI
---
Internet Concepts Project
The Intermail mail forwarding system was moved from C.ISI.EDU
to A.ISI.EDU. Although there were some interruptions in
service due to hardware and software problems, Intermail
appears to be running reliably once again.
Westine [Page 3]
Internet Monthly Report November 1987
Seven RFCs were published this month.
RFC 1028: Davin, J., J. Case, M. Fedor, and M. Schoffstall,
"A SIMPLE GATEWAY MONITORING PROTOCOL",
November 1987.
RFC 1030: Lambert, M., "ON TESTING THE NETBLT PROTOCOL OVER
DIVERS NETWORKS", November 1987.
RFC 1031: Lazear, W., "MILNET NAME DOMAIN TRANSITION",
November 1987.
RFC 1032: Stahl, M., "DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS GUIDE",
November 1987.
RFC 1033: Lotter, M., "DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS OPERATIONS
GUIDE", November 1987.
RFC 1034: Mockapetris, P., "DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND
FACILITIES", November 1987.
RFC 1035: Mockapetris, P., "DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION
AND SPECIFICATION", November 1987.
Ann Westine (Westine@ISI.EDU)
Multimedia Conferencing Project
The ISIC machine is fading from existence, so our "WBCTST"
hourly probing of the Wideband Net and SATNET has been moved
to ISIA. Since ISIA is not directly connected to the ARPANET,
the extra gateway hop may decrease the probe success rate
some. After ISI-GATEWAY was upgraded to an 11/73, though, any
decrease seems slight.
Steve Casner attended the Telecon VIII conference in Anaheim,
CA, Nov. 10th, and saw the Concept Communications video codec
in operation. Steve got positive answers to technical
questions about interfacing this codec into our system for
packet video. Steve is proceeding with the purchase of these
codecs to replace the experimental codecs built at ISI for use
in multimedia conferencing. This will allow us to expand from
two packet video sites to four over the next several months.
Steve Casner (Casner@ISI.EDU)
Brian Hung is looking at implementing echo cancellors for the
Multimedia Teleconferencing using the NEC PD7720 Signal
Processing Interface. Right now he is reading a number of
papers in order to come up with an algorithm to be implemented
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
on the NEC PD7720 chip.
Brian Hung (Hung@ISI.EDU)
NSFNET Project
Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon continued working on the
statistics collection programs for the NSFNET. Bob Braden
attended the Network Program Advisory Group meeting at NSF,
11-13 November. Annette DeSchon attended the IAB Autonomous
Networks Task Force meeting at MIT in Boston, 4-6 November.
Annette DeSchon and Bob Braden (DeSchon@ISI.EDU and
Braden@ISI.EDU)
Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project
Alan Katz wrote a few more utilities for GNU Emacs. Alan also
has been investigating the possibility of making GNU Emacs a
split-editor (with part of it running on a remote machine and
part locally) in order to do performance experiments over the
Wideband net. This would be helpful in determining how to
best split a distributed editor and also to discover how
tolerable using an editor over the Wideband net can be made.
GNU Emacs might be very nice for this since it is very modular
and is also very easy to customize.
Alan has been investigating further issues in equations
representation.
Alan Katz (Katz@ISI.EDU)
MIT-LCS
-------
No report received.
MITRE Corporation
-----------------
No report received.
NTA & NDRE
----------
No report received.
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
SRI
---
No report received.
UCL
---
Research:
Work in the Admiral project is continuing using the formal
specification languages Z and CSP, to design an N-Reliable
Multicast protocol based on Birmans ?CAST primatives, together with
a robust Group management scheme, based on Deering and Cheriton`s
work at Stanford.
Some initial performance figures for Remote Operations (ROS) over
our full ISO stack (ISODE over X.25, or TP0/TCP) show it to be an
order of magnitude slower than existing RPC systems for
Request/Response type activity. Some of this overhead is for
philospical acceptable reasons. We are investigating where the rest
of the time is going.
Infrastructure:
The "UK Triangle" upgrade to 64kbps all round is in hand. UCL now
have a second ethernet on our SATNET Butterfly, which has helped
simplify our access control.
We are now running Bind 4.7.3+ a bit for Domain Name Service, and
should hopefully see better logical availability.
John Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK)
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
----------------------
1. The massive disruptions of the NSFNET community previously
reported have abated further during the month. Persistent
observation, review of NSFNET Backbone logs and pursuit of zoo
events turned up several specific areas in which stability was
improved by further tuning of the Backbone fuzzballs.
However, X.25 ARPANET access paths continue to suffer
occasional disruptions due to congestion of virtual-circuit
resources.
2. One of the Backfuzz improvements involved the mechanism used
to measure baseline delays between nodes. Even though the
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
mechanism is not traffic sensitive, it had become degraded due
to link-level retransmissions caused by noisy circuits,
humungus routing updates and massive overloads. The mechanism
was modified to use pre-engineered delays on the most
congested paths. Further improvements in stability may be
possible upon close examination of the local routing
environment at each Backbone site.
3. The "floating default" routing mechanism mentioned last month
has now been implemented throughout the hellospeaking world of
the Backbone and its dependencies. However, not all ARPANET
gateways that could help drain the swamp are actually doing
that, with the result that some paths continue to suffer
severe congestion.
4. During the month several instances of fuzzbusters, defined
here as bogon routing packets, occured where local routing
packets (both RIPspeak and hellospeak) somehow escaped their
local nets, wandered around the Internet and wound up on
another local net. All fuzzballs, including the NSFNET
Backbone machines, were modified to include fuzzbuster
detectors (illegal in Virginia) which destroy these things on
contact; however, the original points of escape have yet to be
found.
5. Investigation and experiment on Internet congestion control
continues. An analysis of the various logs showed a dramatic
instance where a Big Blue machine (which presumably did not
respond to ICMP Source Quench), drenched a Backbone machine,
while a Craymonster (which did), didn't even get it wet. The
incident suggests that the mechanisms prototyped in the
fuzzball and some hosts really can produce worthwhile
improvements in system utilization and service.
6. Development continues on the Dissimilar Gateway Protocol
(DGP). Mike Little and Woody Woodburn have produced a draft
specification, which is circulating now for review. The next
task is testing the prototype in a controlled environment and
later in the real Internet.
7. Dave Mills attended the NSF NPAG meeting in Washington.
Planning continues for the INARC Workshop, to be held at BBN
on 17-18 December. See the INARC report elsewhere for further
information.
Dave Mills (Mills@HUEY.UDEL)
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NSF NETWORKING
--------------
NSF NETWORKING
UCAR/BBN LABS NSF NETWORK SERVICE CENTER (NNSC)
We completed and started distributing the second issue of the NSF
Network News. To request additional copies, please send a message
to <nnsc@nnsc.nsf.net>.
Craig Partridge attended the Internet Engineering Task Force
meeting in Boulder and Karen Roubicek attended the meeting of the
Federation of American Research Networks in Pittsburgh.
Karen Roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net)
NSFNET BACKBONE SITES
CORNELL UNIVERSITY THEORY CENTER
No report received.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Received first loads of P4200 version 7.4 and it didn't load.
There are two important reasons this version is of merit. One is
the subnet routing problem. The other is that in looking at metric
reconstruction as suggested by STRWG it appears virtually
impossible without 7.4's split horizon.
Line to Minnesota Research Network is due 5 Dec as well as our link
to IMP 94. Connection of note is that MRN will also be closely
connected to IMP94. Link to UIUC will be via P4200s.
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. For a copy of the full report, send mail
to "JVNCnet-nic@jvnca.csc.org".
The gateways were available an average of 94.29 % of the time.
There were many outages this month due to mostly hardware problems
on the VAXs, T1 mux problems and routing problems with the UB
routers, some of these required time to be fixed since some sites
don't have 24 hours coverage. Still, the percentage of
availability has been high, and overall performance of the network
has been good.
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Due to congestion on the NSFNet backbone we diverted traffic
between Penn State and NCAR via JVNCnet and University of Colorado
(a backdoor path), allowing users at Penn State to access NCAR more
reliably.
Plans are on their way to bring up the new extension of the JVNCnet
network in the North East. This extension includes: Yale
University Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, Boston
University, Northeastern University, and University of
Massachussets (Amherst). The schedule for bringing these six new
sites is January 1988. These sites will connect at Harvard, Brown
and JVNC making two double rings, and will be combination of T1 and
56kbps lines (being the T1 the existing circuits).
INFORMATION:
JVNCnet NOC: "net@jvnca.csc.org"
(JVNCnet Network Operations Center)
JVNCnet NIC: "JVNCnet-nic@jvnca.csc.org"
(JVNCnet information)
* 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.
** 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
The connection of NRL (Naval Research Laboratory) in Washington,
D.C. to the USAN Satellite network is complete. Most of the Bit
Error Rate Tests are completed.
The 56 Kbps land line, the cisco routers, and DSU/CSUs for the
SESQUINET connection to USAN is in place. Hookup and testing is
expected to be complete by December 9. The connection will be to an
existing cisco router that also services the USAN connection to the
University of Colorado. This connection will give SESQUINET access
to NSFNET since an NSFNET node is connected to USAN. The addition
of SESQUINET will bring to eleven the number of gateways on USAN.
by Don Morris (morris@scdsw1.ucar.edu)
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PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER
The PSC Fuzzball continued to perform well during November despite
many changes to software. A concern was the "flapping routes"
throughout the month, especially to the other backbone nets and
other critical nets.
Problems with virtual circuit limitations using ACC's X.25
interface to the PSN and BBN's move to a new software revision for
the PSN's have caused numerous headaches on PSC-GW, but with
reconfigurations of the net and advertising some NSF networks at
other ARPANET gateways the situation has stabilized. New versions
of software and firmware for the ACC board will be installed soon.
These will not fix the virtual circuit limitation problem. New
gated versions and configurations have been installed throughout
the month. PSC-GW forwarded about 800,000 packets per day between
the ARPANET and NSFnet.
The installation of the satellite dish for PSN #21 here has been
completed and tests are being run. We have had a line installed to
the CMU PSN which we are willing to use pending action by DCA. We
have received approval to connect another gateway machine to the
PSN here. The new gateway machine has been built and is running
the newest ACC code soon to be installed on PSC-GW.
The T1 local loop connecting us to the Litel Point of Presence in
Pittsburgh has been installed in preparation for connecting the
western sites of PSCnet. We will install a Proteon gateway at
Litel's Cleveland POP early in December and as soon as local loops
are completed the rest of PSCnet will be installed.
Another gateway machine has been built to provide better access for
our CMU users to our center and the NSFnet. A gated configuration
for this machine is being coordinated with the NSF NOC.
by David O'Leary (oleary@morgul.psc.edu)
SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER
Our PSN's first trunk line (to USC/ISI), installed on 29 Oct., was
tested this month from here to LA. At last report, however, it was
still 150 ft. short of the ISI PSN. The second line to UCLA,
service date 4 Dec, is not yet in sight.
We are still awaiting 7.4 for our Proteon p4200.
We have had no change in our line configuration this past month.
by Paul Love (loveep@sds.sdsc.edu)
Westine [Page 10]
Internet Monthly Report November 1987
NSFNET REGIONAL AFFILIATED & CONSORTIUM NETWORKS
BARRNET
BARRNET is operating with reasonable stability of T-1 clear
channels, although there is agreement that the telcos need better
understanding of sensitivity of non-muxed T-1 channels to the
service operations they employ for muxed T-1. Release 7.4 of the
Proteon gateway software has been stable at NASA-Ames for over a
month now. This version is reportedly 30% faster than release 7.3.
Milo Medin has configured the Ames gateways to use "static routes
with override", using an initial RIP hop count of 16 (infinity) and
then letting RIP dynamically determine which routes are really
usable. This allows some administrative control over routing
information while still allowing routes to be dynamically marked as
up or down. There is consensus that it is desirable to have all
BARRNet gateways (routers) run the same configuration.
BARRNET's policy and objectives are to achieve maximum
connectivity/reachability at the earliest possible time without
breaking things. Routing continues to be a problem until the
"global" routing metrics are fixed, amongst many other things.
Currently most delicate is advertising of routes into BARRNET from
other networks through the SDSC gateway and advertising of routes
to BARRNET from networks other than those selected. The immediate
objective is to advertise to BARRNet from SDSC the networks at the
5 backbone connected supercomputer centers plus the networks at
UCSD and UCSB. The SDSC gateway will munge RIP metrics to
advertise 1 hop reachability to/from BARRNet and the SCCs. The
expanded reachability routing issues (e.g., advertising BARRNet
routes outside of the SCCs) will be discussed with NSFNET gurus.
For the present, the advertising of these routes must be limited.
The BARRNET consortium is now developing its policies for
additional membership. About 10 organizations have inquired;
government labs, educational institutions and profit sector
companies. Early additional connectivity is expected to LLNL, LBL
and SLAC.
by Bill Yundt (GD.WHY@forsythe.stanford.edu)
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JVNCNET (Refer to JVNNSC backbone report)
MERIT (No report received)
MIDNET (No report received)
MINNESOTA REGIONAL NET (MRNet)
Minnesota Regional Net (MRNet) is waiting on AT&T to install its
trunk to NCSA, due December 5th. Proteon P4200 is here. MRNet
bylaws approved by charter members. Gated work going on on current
ARPANET gateway VAX to allow support for NSFnet, ARPANET and MRNet
routing. MRNet technical meetings working on security problems for
Cray, ETA, etc. Looks like mail only to them.
by Thomas Jacobson (thomas@umn-rei-uc.ARPA)
NCSANET
NCSA and the University of Illinois Chicago campus will be
installing a T1 line to be up by January 1, 1988. The UI-C will
serve as a Chicago area hub, allowing area institutions to share T1
access to NCSA and the NSFnet Backbone.
A recent meeting was held to discuss issues such as network
operations and support as well as to discuss the various possible
choices for routers. It was generally agreed that a non-vendor
specific hub would be best, allowing institutions to connect to the
hub with existing equipment. Seven Chicago area institutions were
represented at this meeting.
by Charlie Catlett (catlett@ncsa.ncsa.uiuc.edu)
NORTHWESTNET (No report received)
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NYSERNET
As of 5 December 1987, NYSERNet had the following topology:
Clarkson
Syracuse--+ |
| |
Rochester--------Cornell---------RPI---Albany
| || |
Buffalo...Fredonia || |
| ....Oswego || |
| || |
Binghamton || +-------- | ------StonyBrook
| || | |
| || | |
CUNY--NYTEL/NSMAC--Columbia======NYU-+
| |\ | | | /| |
| | \ NYTEL/GC | NYNEX/S&T / | |
| | \ BNL / | |
| | \ / | |
| | +-------------Rockefeller | |
| | | |
| +------------------------------+ |
| |
+-------------POLY-------------------+
||
==== || T1
||
\ | / 56kbits
.... 9.6kbits
The Cornell Columbia/link was upgraded from 56kbits to T1.
by Marty Schoffstall (schoff@nisc.nyser.net)
SDSCNET (Refer to SDSC backbone report)
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
SESQUINET
The complete initially proposed SesquiNet configuration has been
operational now for four months. The following campus networks are
being served, and are 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
During the last month, we have actually experienced one gateway
hardware failure and one gateway software failure that effected UH
and TAMU, respectively.
We have now done some analysis of the reliability of the network,
based on logs written by our monitoring program. For each of the
sites listed below, we note the number of (unscheduled) failures
and the percent of availability (percentage of time the site was
up, deducting scheduled down time).
--------------------------------
Site Failures Available
--------------------------------
BCM 0 100.0 %
HARC 5 90.3 %
RU 0 99.8 %
TAMU 2 99.9 %
TSU 2 100.0 %
UH 2 99.3 %
--------------------------------
While some of the problems were due to leased lines and two gateway
failures, most of the unscheduled downtime was due to machine room
power problems.
The phone line from NSFnet/NCAR to SesquiNet/Rice has been
completed, and I am working closely with David Wood of WestNet to
put it online using the SesquiNet/cisco router at Rice and the
WestNet/cisco router at NCAR. When operational, this link will
advertise SesquiNet to NSFnet, and will technically allow us to
advertise SesquiNet to USAN and to the NASA Science Network.
by Guy Almes (almes@rice.edu)
SURANET (No report received)
Westine [Page 14]
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WESTNET
1. A technical workshop was held at the University of Colorado at
Boulder from November 9 to 11, 1987. There were attendees from
14 campuses and New Mexico Technet. The first day and one half
covered general topics, while the last day was spent on the
cisco hardware. The wokshop was very well received by all
attendees.
2. Installation of the cisco gateways has been completed at the
University of New Mexico and the University of Wyoming. New
Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and New Mexico State
University are in the process of being connected.
3. The circuit from New Mexico Technet to NCAR is in the process
of being ordered. Installation is scheduld for February 1988.
4. A request for bids is being prepared for all remaining
circuits for Westnet. Installation of these additional
circuits is scheduled for March 1, 1988.
5. All hardware for Westnet has been ordered, except for the
spares, which are planned to be ordered in January 1988.
6. We are preparing a mini-proposal to submit to NSF to connect
Brigham Young University and the University of Utah into
Westnet. As the circuit to Utah State University already
passes through Salt Lake City, the costs involved are minimal.
by Pat Burns (pburns%csugreen.bitnet@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
TASK FORCE REPORTS
------------------
APPLICATIONS -- USER INTERFACE
No report received.
AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS
The Autonomous Networks Task Force met in Boston, Nov. 5-6 at
MIT. Minutes will be available soon. A brief summary of our
discussion will be provided in a future Internet monthly
report.
Deborah Estrin (Estrin@OBERON.USC.EDU)
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
END-TO-END SERVICES
The End-to-End Task Force held a meeting at the MIT Endicott
House on October 22-23.
Host-Group Multicasting
The task force chose a target date of July 1988 for moving the
IP multicasting spec (RFC966, RFC988) to a proposed Internet
standard. First, however, the Task Force must consider some
changes which Steve Deering has proposed to the IGMP protocol.
These changes would eliminate the Create Group, Join Group,
and Leave Group operations, in favor of a mechanism based upon
periodic status messages the agent and upon the agents
"defending" names in use.
The lack of progress towards development of applications using
IP multicasting is a disappointment; we hope that moving the
protocol towards an Internet standard will encourage its use.
Transaction Protocols
Jim Stevens of Rockwell described his Transaction Transport
Protocol TTP, developed for the SURAN effort. TTP, like the
ESP protocol developed at UCL, does not have a strict
request/response model, but provides a full-duplex message
stream with caching of state information at each end and
timeouts to achieve the "connectionless" and minimal-packet
properties. The protocol is being implemented at SRI as part
of SURAN; it is not known whether this will result in any
useful product for research in protocols.
One of the major unsolved problems in transaction protocols is
how to do flow control without connection setup. It was
suggested that the slow-start algorithm of Van Jacobson might
be a very good solution. Unfortunately, there are no early
prospects for experiments to try out this idea.
Performance
As always, Van Jacobson stimulated an interesting discussion.
He has developed plausible general arguments to show that a
stable windowing algorithm must necessarily involve
exponential decrease of traffic but linear increase. The
argument is based upon the solutions to the first-order
difference equation governing a window-based transport
protocol over IP. Similar arguments lead to the conclusion
that rate-based protocols are potentially unstable.
There was some consideration of whether Van's TCP ideas could
be applied to dynamic selection of NETBLT parameters. Dave
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Clark felt that by the time slow-start had found an operating
point for the Wideband net, the entire transfer would be over.
He plans to work in a different direction, to negotiate with
gateways to set up a bandwidth reservation in which NETBLT can
work efficiently.
Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU)
INTERNET ARCHITECTURE
Twenty-three requests have been received so far to attend the
INARC Workshop on 17-18 December at BBN in Cambridge, MA. The
theme of the workshop is the next-generation internet, where
we all get to second-guess the Internet architects and build
the next one. Since space may be limited, others wishing to
attend the bash are invited to send without delay a one-
paragraph summary of their favorite agenda topic to:
David L. Mills
Electrical Engineering Department
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
(302) 451-6534 or 737-9211
ARPAbox: mills@udel.edu
Dave Mills (Mills@HUEY.UDEL.EDU)
INTERNET ENGINEERING
No report received.
INTERNET MANAGEMENT
Phill Gross and Vint Cerf have met twice and will meet once
more in December to finalize the task force report. Phill is
also working on a larger report for Mitre into which much of
the result of the task force will go. That report will go to
DCA which sponsored the internet planning effort at Mitre.
Vint Cerf (Cerf@A.ISI.EDU)
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
PRIVACY
The IAB Privacy Task Force had a productive two-day meeting at
BBN Communications Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts on
4 and 5 November. Attendees were: David Balenson, Curt
Barker, Matt Bishop, Morrie Gasser, Steve Kent, John Linn, Dan
Nessett, Mike Padlipsky, and Steve Wilbur.
A provisional revised version of RFC989 was presented,
including several changes and clarifications relative to the
released version, and a number of issues were discussed.
Authentication/integrity processing will always be applied to
the entirety of a message, even when encryption is applied
selectively. It was provisionally resolved that the CCITT
certificate format will be used to define a public-key
certificate's constituent parts. The relation between SMTP
addresses and X.400 O/R names is under investigation. We
carried out an extended discussion of alternative integrity
approaches, in search for a replacement for a single MAC
encrypted for each recipient, which Chris Mitchell's papers
had identified as inadequate for the multi-recipient case. A
per-recipient header parameter will specify an independent
choice of message integrity check (MIC) algorithm for each
recipient. One option will be the "ambidextrous MAC"
LMAC/RMAC algorithm, computing two MACs: one computed in the
conventional manner from left to right and one computed from
right to left by reversing the order of the 8-octet blocks
comprising the message. The key used for these computations
will be a variant of the key used for data encryption.
We discussed the scope of a future RFC to follow and
complement RFC989 by defining the key management
infrastructure to support privacy-enhanced mail transmission,
and reviewed the state of implementation activities.
Subsequent to the meeting, updated documentation was provided
to Deborah Estrin of USC to support her organization's
proposed work in this area, and meeting minutes were
distributed to the membership.
Several topics distinct from RFC989 were also discussed. We
are checking on licensing issues relevant to use of the RSA
algorithm. Correspondence from RSA Data Security, Inc. on
this issue was received in response to inquiries after the
meeting. We heard a presentation on the British Telecom
proposal to CCITT for X.400 electronic mail security. We
discussed the Internet Engineering Task Force's concerns about
authentication and privacy issues relevant to gateways and
monitoring centers. Several messages have been exchanged on
this topic, and a follow-up meeting with IETF representatives
is anticipated.
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Internet Monthly Report November 1987
The next Privacy Task Force meeting is tentatively scheduled
for Wednesday and Thursday, 2-3 March 1988, to be hosted by
Dan Nessett at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
John Linn (Linn@CCY.BBN.COM)
ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY
No report received.
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING
Nothing to report this month.
Barry Leiner (Leiner@ICARUS.RIACS.EDU)
SECURITY
No report received.
TACTICAL INTERNET
No report received.
TESTING AND EVALUATION
No report received.
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