<NIS.NSF.NET> [IMR] IMR87-12.TXT
Westine [Page 1]
~
DECEMBER 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@NNSC.NSF.NET).
BBN LABORATORIES AND BBN COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION
---------------------------------------------------
WIDEBAND NETWORK
Connectivity was established between a Wideband Butterfly Gateway
installed at the Naval Ocean Systems Center and the BSAT packet
switch located at M/A-COM Government Systems, Inc. These two San
Diego, CA sites are connected via a T1-rate terrestrial
communication circuit. Difficulties with the installation of this
circuit had delayed the establishment of the NOSC-Wideband
connection, which can now provide Internet access for hosts to be
installed on a NOSC Ethernet.
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
The Wideband Network supported a multi-site demonstration of the
Cronus Distributed Operating System which was presented at the Rome
Air Development Center on December 9. Wide area communication
through the Wideband network was a prominent part of the
presentation, which was given as part a RADC Technology Exchange
meeting.
BSAT Release 6.3 was distributed to the Wideband Network sites this
month. This release increases the number of requests for future
satellite channel capacity that can be sent within a single
satellite channel burst. It also removes a previously existing
limitation on the number of static multicast group members that can
be interfaced to a given BSAT.
SATNET
Although the SATNET performance was generally good, there were two
major problems in the month of December. The Goonhilly SIMP began
adversely affecting both satellite channels causing a loss of
connectivity with Europe. The PSP terminal was reset and a tripped
breaker was restored. We also experienced high error rates on the
phone line to DCEC. Because of a misunderstanding, the local phone
company began working on the line to CSS. This resulted in
periodic losses of connectivity to the Arpanet. Service was
restored to CSS and the problem with the line to DCEC was resolved.
Even with these problems, the availability of the channel still
averaged 98% from tests run by ISI.
A patch has been tested in the SATNET testbed which approximately
doubles the throughput on the two satellite channels. The tests
were made with the SIMP message generator and will be verified in
the operational SATNET. There still appears to be a throughput
bottle neck at the host interface of the SIMP, progress is being
made to eliminate it as well. We plan to distribute software with
the new channel code at the SATNET meeting in January.
INTERNET RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
During December we tested a patch for the LSI-11 Gateways to allow
them to send more datagrams into the Arpanet by using a different
handling type in the 1822 AHIP message when the RFNM limit (8) was
reached. This had the hoped for result of greatly reducing the
number datagrams dropped by the gateways, in some cases by two
orders of magnitude!
It had the unexpected result (in the Arpanet under the New End-End
protocol) for X.25 hosts of causing the PSN's to multiple identical
(from the hosts point of view) X.25 virtual circuits to be opened
to the hosts. This caused problems for some X.25 hosts which were
not prepared to accept duplicate virtual circuits.
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
We believe the patch results in a very significant improvement to
overall Internet performance and we would like to see it installed
in the LSI-11 gateways, a patch written for the Butterfly Gateways,
and similar changes be made to all gateways. We think it is worth
while the for X.25 hosts to change to be able accept multiple
virtual circuits. Overall service would be much improved. Please
send me your comments (hinden@bbn.com).
Bob Hinden (Hinden@BBN.COM)
ISI
---
Internet Concepts Project
Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris attended the 2nd TCP/IP
Interoperability conference in Crystal City, VA., Dec 1-4.
Paul organized a session on Domain Practices. Paul
Mockapetris visited BBN Dec 17-18 to attend the Internet
Architecture Task Force meeting. Paul distributed a new
version of root nameserver to TOPS-20 sites, to implement
distribution of SOAs for negative caching and to fix problem
related to distribution of address information for root
servers.
Two RFCs were published this month.
RFC 1036: Horton, M., and R. Adams, "Standard for Interchange
of USENET Messages, December 1987.
RFC 1037: Greenburg, B., and S. Keene, "NFILE - A File Access
Protocol, December 1987.
Ann Westine (Westine@ISI.EDU)
Multimedia Conferencing Project
We are still awaiting delivery of the Concept Communications
IMAGE 30 video codec. In the meantime, we are planning out
the necessary changes to the packet video software required to
accommodate the new codec, and implementing those which can be
applied to the current experimental codec as well.
Steve Casner (Casner@ISI.EDU)
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
Brian Hung is working on an assembly language program for the
NEC uPD7720 signal processing chip to implement echo
cancelling function. The purpose of this is to eliminate the
echos generated at the local 4-to-2 wire telephone hybrid.
Brian Hung (Hung@ISI.EDU)
NSFNET Project
Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon completed the first release of
the NSFNET statistics gathering package NNStat. A beta-test
version of the acquisition program statspy was first installed
on a Sun at Michigan by Hans-Werner Braun, so we could verify
the ability to collect data from it remotely. Word of the
program spread rapidly, and a number of sites requested the
first release. We set up a mailing list of interested people,
which now numbers over a dozen. We have been kept busy fixing
bugs and enhancing the capabilities of the package. This
resulted in a second release on December 31, and another
scheduled for early next month.
Bob Braden attended the Second TCP/IP Interoperability
Workshop in Crystal City, Virginia, chaired a session on
higher-level protocols, and gave a talk entitled "Internet
End-to-End Protocols -- Progress and Prospects".
Bob Braden worked on a joint document with Bob Cooper, Peter
Kirstein, and Roland Rosner of the UK, proposing to link the
academic networks in the US and the UK. In particular, the
proposal will lease a 64kbit transatlantic circuit linking
NSFNET in the US to JANET, the UK academic X.25 network. This
circuit is to carry IP encapsulated in X.25. At the UK end,
there will be a MicroVax running a clone of the UCL
application-level gateway; that is, it will relay between SMTP
and Grey-Book mail, between FTP and NIFTP/FTAM file transfers,
and between Telnet and XXX terminal service. The plan is to
connect to JANET at the University of London Computer Center
and to NSFNET at JVNC.
Bob Braden & Annette DeSchon (DeSchon@ISI.EDU, Braden@ISI.EDU)
Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project
Alan Katz continued working on using GNU Emacs as a split
editor. Most, if not all of the functions to do this are
being written in GNU Emacs Lisp.
Alan Katz (Katz@ISI.EDU)
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
During December, the packet-echoing and packet-dropping
feature of PVP was tested for correctness in a three-way (i.e.
more than two-way) connection. During testing, a new mode of
packet-disordering was discovered in the Wideband network. In
an effort to investigate this, an unrelated bug was found in
PVP having to do with passing virtual address pointers between
nodes.
D.J. Walden (Walden@ISI.EDU)
MIT-LCS
-------
No internet related progress to report.
Lixia Zhang (Lixia@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU)
MITRE Corporation
-----------------
Nothing to report this month.
Ann Whitaker (Whitaker@Gateway.Mitre.Org)
SRI
---
Internet Research
I attended IETF Open Routing Working Group meeting on December 3-4,
at Proteon, Inc., Westborough, Mass. The Meeting was devoted to
the continuing preparation of the document "Requirements for
Inter-Autonomous Systems Routing".
Zaw-Sing Su <zsu@tsca.istc.sri.com>
UCL
---
UCL is involved in a number of OSI acitivities. These are seen as
an important indirect component of the DARPA activity, and are
reported at intervals. This is a summary of the ongoing activity.
There is ongoing work to develop an OSI infrastructure at UCL.
This means provision of OSI communication protocols and tools to
facilitate development of OSI applications. It is hoped that
during 1988, these experimental systems will be used as a basis for
Westine [Page 5]
Internet Monthly Report December 1987
pilot OSI services and for research into OSI applications.
Most work has been on the ISODE package, developed by M.T. Rose and
D.E. Cass at Northrop Research and Technology Center. UCL acts as
the European distribution point for this package. The basic OSI
services are support of the Transport and Session layers. The
ISODE package was implemented with Transport class 0 over TCP/IP,
and work at UCL has extended this to operate over X.25. A
particular problem has been to provide a fully asynchronous OSI
application interface over synchronous X.25 interfaces. The
disadvantages of synchronous network interfaces were painfully
emphasised by this work. An OSI support environment at UCL is
available on the majority of the UNIX systems at UCL. This means
SUN, VAX, and Pyramid hardware. There is also an experimental
system operating of "Pink Book" (the UK Academic Community defined
mapping of X.25 onto Ethernet LLC2). This will be of more interest
when we obtain a second piece of pink book hardware!
We have been looking at the performance of these systems at various
levels, and hope to report in more detail later.
There are three separate, but related, X.400 activities. The first
project was to develop an X.400 to JNT Mail protocol converter
based on the EAN X.400 system from University of British Columbia.
This project was funded by Alvey. Work was done to increase the
robustness and flexibility of the system. It was brought into a
state where it could be operated by a group which did not need to
understand its internal operation. It was operated as a pilot
service at UCL, and then was transferred to University of London
Computer Centre (ULCC), where it is now operating as a UK Academic
Community Service. This is an important step towards making mail a
full service: Previous UK mail gateway facilities have only been
operated by their developers.
The same system has also been used for a range of X.400
interworking trials. UCL has been involved in a number of
interconnection exercises with various manufacturers, including
user trials with British Telecom services. Some of these
connections, for example with the French Academic Network, have
developed into experimental services. The department uses these
links for communication within several projects.
Given the experience gained whilst developing the EAN Gateway, the
group is now working on a more advanced protocol conversion
facility. This system, "PP", will be a generic X.400 system which
supports RFC 822 based (text) mail, X.400(1984) and X.400 (1988).
By storing messages as directory trees, it will be able to handle
Multimedia messages in a flexible manner, and perform a wide range
of protocol conversions (e.g. JNT Mail <-> X.400) and format
conversions (e.g. G3 Fax <-> SUN bitmap). Work is well underway on
this system, and it is expected to be operational during 1988. It
Westine [Page 6]
Internet Monthly Report December 1987
is intended to use this system as the basis for a range of
experiments and pilot services. Code will be made available to
other research and academic groups, and its availability will be
announced in this forum.
We are working on a number of aspects of directory services. This
ranges from a system analogous to an online white pages telephone
directory, to a system for high speed lookup of OSI information.
It is generally agreed that such services are urgently required,
but there is very little experience in this area.
The THORN project (The Obviously Required Nameserver) is an ESPRIT
project to develop a Directory Service aligned to the emerging
standards. There are a number of industrial and academic partners:
Olivetti; Bull; GEC; ICL; Siemens; SW; CERN; DFN; INRIA. These
groups are working to develop a pre-competitive implementation of a
directory service, in line with the emerging standards. The first
phase of the project has produced an implementation according to
ECMA TR 32, with simple replication facilities specified by the
project. UCL is working on two aspects of this project. The first
is to organise and participate in what is described as the Large
Scale Pilot Exercise. This utilizes the system produced in the
first phase of the project, and aims to gain real experience with
the usage of directory services. An experimental service will be
provided within UCL and in other selected parts of the UK Academic
Community. This will interact with similar communities in France
and Germany. It is hoped to examine a number of different uses of
the directory service, with support of electronic mail as a major
consideration. This system is just being released within UCL, and
contains several thousand entries (people and hosts). In the
context of THORN, and of another Esprit project (INCA - the
Integrated Network Communication Architecture), UCL is working
towards the development of X.500 directory services.
Steve Kille & Jon Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK)
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
----------------------
1. For the last eighteen months I have been watching the NSFNET
Backbone fuzzballs and gateways, learning from bizarre bogons,
menacing martians, ominous overloads, rotten routing and all
the other things that thrive in a healthy, growing Internet.
Over the last few months massive fuzzware changes were made to
cope with the recent explosion in traffic, number of nets and
frequency of routing spasms. I have come to the conclusion
that further improvements in the areas of throughput and
robustness are not in the best interests of my own research
projects and cannot be justified in view of the impending
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
replacement of the fuzzballs scheduled for July. I will
continue to evolve the fuzzball in other areas as a highly
useful research tool and network surgical instrument.
2. One of the goals during this latest upgrade in fuzzball
functionality was to implement and evaluate a priority-
queueing service discipline in order to improve response times
for interactive services like TELNET at possible expense of
bulk-transfer services like FTP. The new discipline was
installed at all NSFNET Backbone sites and most other sites
early in the month. Subjective reports, confirmed by
measurements under typical traffic conditions, indicate that
TELNET traffic across the NSFNET Backbone has about half the
delay and variance of non-TELNET traffic. However, since this
effectively pushes non-TELNET traffic further back in the
queues where quench and preemption are more likely, more study
and possible modification of the fairness mechanisms may be
necessary.
3. In preparation for the leap-second which ended 1987 and in
despair of the fact I have spent the first moments of the last
seven years advancing the year in all fuzzballs known to me,
the fuzzball timekeeping code was extensively revised. The
result is an automatic year rollover and automatic leap-second
insertion via the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and fuzzball
local-net protocols. Early on 31 December the leap-indicator
bits were set at selected fuzzball hosts equipped with WWVB
and WWV radio clocks. These bits were then automatically
distributed to all NTP-speaking hosts and then further
distributed to other hosts supporting the fuzzball local-net
protocols. Upon the leap, all fuzzballs at U Delaware, U
Maryland, ISI and Linkabit inserted the extra second and
sailed accurately into 1988. The next step is to modify the
firmware in the radio clocks themselves so they don't go
cuckoo and have to resynchronize following the leap.
4. To see how the general Internet population coped with the leap
second and in order to update data collected in 1983, a
glorious three-day experiment was carried out with the
approximately 5000 hosts and gateways listed in the NIC
HOSTS.TXT file. Four packets were sent at five-second
intervals to each host using UDP/NTP, UDP/TIME and
ICMP/TIMESTAMP protocols and the clock offsets (in
milliseconds) for each protocol averaged with respect to local
time, which is synchronized via NTP to a radio-clock host.
There were 46 hosts responding to NTP, 1158 responding to TIME
and 1963 responding to ICMP requests. The distribution
functions for each are shown below. More discussion in another
place at another time.
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
Decile NTP UDP ICMP
----------------------------------------------
1 11 4632 5698
2 37 18238 27965
3 66 38842 68596
4 177 68213 127367
5 364 126232 201908
6 567 195950 285092
7 3466 267119 525509
8 20149 422129 2.91426E+06
9 434634 807135 5.02336E+07
10 1.17971E+09 1.59524E+09 2.11591E+09
5. Mike Minnich and Dave Mills attended the INARC Workshop, which
was held at BBN on 17-18 December. See the INARC report
elsewhere for further information. Dave Mills attended an NRC
meeting on survivable networks in Washington on 8-9 December
and presented a tutorial Advanced Topics in Internetworking at
the Second TCP/IP Interoperability Conference on 1 December.
Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU)
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NSF NETWORKING
--------------
UCAR/BBN LABS NNSC
Craig Partridge led a meeting on network management at the Second
TCP/IP Interoperability Conference in Washington. Dick Edmiston
represented the NNSC at the NSF meeting where participants
discussed NSFNET transition issues.
Karen Roubicek (roubicek@NNSC.NSF.NET)
NSFNET BACKBONE SITES
CORNELL UNIVERSITY THEORY CENTER
November and December have been spent primarily stabilizing the
NSFNET backbone network through software changes, in the fuzzballs,
the surrounding gatedaemons, and the tables for each. The backbone
currently carries traffic and routing information for about 105
networks - the actual number varies, of course.
Here are Doug Elias's totals for November and December. Details
are available upon request.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NSFNET TRAFFIC REPORT Period: Nov 1 - 30, '87
Total Traffic Figures
Between Sites Ethernet
Input 111381608 61279840
Output 105722051 55124918
In+Out 217103659 116404758
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NSFNET TRAFFIC REPORT Period: Dec 1 - 31, '87
Total Traffic Figures
Between Sites Ethernet
Input 110551496 62241199
Output 107690883 56274351
In+Out 218242379 118515550
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Line to Minnesota Research Network came up as planned. The
connection between P4200's is humming along. The gated
configurations allowing their sqawking to NSFNET came along mid-
December.
Link to IMP94 is still no joy.
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T1 connection to UofI - Chicago is in but needs DSU/CSU's. This
will replace various connections currently in place in the Chicago
area (NW, U of Chicago, Argonne NL). May also be connection to
Fermi, but that is not settled.
by Ed Krol (krol@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu)
JOHN VON NEUMANN NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER
No report received.
NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH AND UNIVERSITY SATELLITE
NETWORK PROJECT (USAN)
The Braden/DeSchon NNstat/STATSPY code has been installed on
windom.ucar.edu and has already proved very useful not only in
determining traffic patterns on USAN, but in detecting a network
that was flooding USAN with rwho packets.
Some statistics over a 72 hour period show the following:
Total IP Packets (3.1 M). Total Packets (4.5M)
IP Packets destined for UCARnet (47%). Pass-through Packets (53%)
Top nine Source/Destination (S/D) IP nets account for (50%) of traffic.
Top 3 S/D IP nets (34%)
Top S/D IP net (15%) is 128.138 (University of Colorado)
by Don Morris (morris@scdsw1.ucar.edu)
PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER
No report received.
SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER
Our PSN's first trunk line (to USC/ISI), installed on 29 October,
has had the last 150 ft. at ISI installed. We are now awaiting the
Telco folks to come test that last piece. The second line to UCLA,
service date 4 Dec, is still not yet in sight.
We are still looking forward to 7.4, along with an additional 0.5
meg, for our Proteon p4200.
We have had no change in our line configuration this past month.
In January, we expect to bring up a 56k line to UC Irvine to
connect their campus network to NSFNET.
Paul Love (loveep@sds.sdsc.edu)
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NSFNET REGIONAL AFFILIATED & CONSORTIUM NETWORKS
BARRNET (No report received)
JVNCNET (Refer to JVNNSC backbone report)
MERIT
Merit was recently awarded a cooperative agreement by the National
Science Foundation for the upgrading, expansion and management of
the NSFNET backbone network. This award extends over the next five
years. Our proposal includes the extending of the current backbone
to thirteen from the current six sites and using T1 lines to gain
higher bandwidth. The proposal also includes joint agreements with
IBM and MCI. IBM will be providing the hardware and the software
to implement NSFNET's packet switching and network management
facilities, while MCI will play a key role in providing the
transmission backbone for the NSFNET. The T1 circuits supplied by
MCI within their backbone will be implemented through DS3 carriers.
Individuals wishing further information about this project may
contact us at:
"Merit_Computer_Network@um.cc.umich.edu."
We started to beta test the traffic statistics program developed by
Bob Braden at ISI. Among other functions, the program allows
gathering a net-to-net traffic matrix about the data flow on the
attached Ethernet. As this function will be a valuable tool to
determine traffic flows within the NSFNET backbone, we started to
use it to gather statistics on the Ethernet attached to the NCAR
NSFNET backbone node. This testing was possible thanks to Don
Morris at NCAR for providing the necessary access to his machine.
We have installed and are starting to use the SGMP (Simple Gateway
Monitoring Protocol) software in our Proteon gateways while
runninig the user application program (available from NYSERNET) on
a Sun workstations. We also experimented with the SGMP version
available from Jeff Case (UTK) for IBM-PC type machines.
Hardware and software designed at the University of British
Columbia has been installed at the University of Michigan to
implement TCP/IP protocols for mainframes running the MTS operating
system. The applications for Telnet and FTP are currently in alpha
test.
Western Michigan University will gateway its DECnet installations
to the Internet world using a MicroVAX 2000, which is supposed to
be delivered soon.
A T1 line has been ordered by Michigan State University to upgrade
the link between the University of Michigan and Michigan State.
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
This will be used for both Merit internal as well as for Internet
traffic. MSU has received a 56Kbps line to the Purdue Arpanet IMP,
the modems and hardware to connect the line on its end, but still
waiting for the line to be connected at Purdue.
by Jessica Yu (jessica_yu@um.cc.umich.edu)
MIDNET (No report received)
MINNESOTA REGIONAL NET (MRNet) (No report received)
NCSANET
T1 to UI-Chicago is up and running. University of Chicago and
Northwestern University will be connecting through UI-C via T1 by
March 15. Currently these schools share a 56Kbps circuit to NCSA.
Argonne National Laboratory, currently connected through UI-C at
56Kbps, will upgrade to T1 as well. Illinois Institute of
Technology is in the process of planning to connect through UI-C at
56Kbps.
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has ordered a 56Kbps
circuit to NCSA, scheduled to be up by March 15.
The Vitalink earthstation connecting Indiana University is
scheduled to be moved (due to local construction) from UI Digital
Computer Lab to UI Computing Applications Building at the end of
January.
by Charlie Catlett (catlett@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
NORTHWESTNET
All but two nodes of NorthWestNet are up and running; the last two,
Washington State University and the University of Idaho, will be
connected this week. A 56 kb line to the NSFNET backbone from
Seattle to San Diego will be installed by the end of January or
early February.
by Hellmut Golde (Golde@cs.washington.edu)
NYSERNET (No report received)
SDSCNET (Refer to SDSC backbone report)
SESQUINET
The complete initially proposed SesquiNet configuration has been
operational now for five months. The following campus networks are
being served, and are advertised via EGP to the core:
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
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
The phone line from NSFNET/NCAR to SesquiNet/Rice has been
completed, and we have been using this line operationally for the
last three weeks to a limited extent. The line connects a pair of
cisco gateways: one integral to SesquiNet (at Rice) and the other
integral to WestNet (at NCAR). Since the gateway at NCAR shares an
ethernet with USAN and with gateways for the NSFNET backbone and
the NASA Science Network, it has lots of potential usage. We have
not yet, however, completed the arrangements for the exchange of
routing information that will allow this line to be used to the
fullest.
Activities for the coming month include:
> Testing the dual protocol (IP and DECnet) support for the cisco
gateways within SesquiNet.
> Adding Prairie-View A&M University to the network.
by Guy Almes (almes@rice.edu)
SURANET (No report received)
WESTNET
1. In New Mexico, New Mexico Technet, New Mexico Inst. of Mining
& Technology, and New Mexico State University are now
interconnected. The 56 kbps serial line from New Mexico
Technet to NCAR is projected to be installed by Feb. 15,
1988. The University of New Mexico is yet to be connected, as
they are in the process of performing some adjustments to
their campus network before installing the cisco gateway.
2. The University of Wyoming is connected to the Internet, but is
experiencing minor problems with the 56 kbps serial interface
card which are in the process of being resolved.
3. We are continuing to investigate the best manner in which to
provide service to Brigham Young University and the University
of Utah. A mini-proposal is being prepared in this regard, to
be forwarded to NSF.
4. We have been negotiating with Eric Aupperle where the T1 line
to serve Westnet should be installed. We have been told by NSF
that the University of Utah is the favored location.
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
5. Both Colorado State University (129.82) and New Mexico State
University (129.138) have successfully completed the
transition to Class B addresses.
6. David Wood has discussed with Scott Brim running the "HELLO"
protocol on Westnet. The software is available, and we are
waiting for it to be installed at NCAR before trying it. We
anticipate testing it during the month of January.
by Pat Burns (pburns%csugreen.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Westine [Page 15]
Internet Monthly Report December 1987
TASK FORCE REPORTS
------------------
APPLICATIONS -- USER INTERFACE
No report received.
AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS
No news to report for the ANTF.
Deborah Estrin (Estrin@OBERON.USC.EDU)
END-TO-END SERVICES
Nothing to report this month.
Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU)
INTERNET ARCHITECTURE
About forty people attended the INARC Workshop held on 17-18
December at BBN. The theme of the workshop was technical
issues of the next-generation internet. A report on the agenda
items and discussions, which included a bomb scare, will be
available shortly.
Dave Mills (Mills@HUEY.UDEL.EDU)
INTERNET ENGINEERING
1) There has been another round of growth in the IETF mailing
list. After exposure at the December TCP/IP Conference and in
the December `Connexions', requests swelled the list to almost
250 names and about 10 exploders. We can't really host
meetings of 250+ folks yet and I suspect (based on the actual
attendence of the last few meetings) that many are more
interested in the email discussions, rather than becoming
actively involved. Therefore, I feel it is time it re-
institute the ietf-interest list, which I had eliminated a few
months ago.
Toward that end, I divided the full list by putting all names
of people who attended either the last two meetings into the
main list and the rest (and all exploders) into the interest
list.
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Internet Monthly Report December 1987
>From now on, all general discussion should be addressed to
ietf-interest@gateway.mitre.org or
ineng-interest@venera.isi.edu.
(the lists at ISI and Mitre are identical.)
The main list is
ietf@gateway.mitre.org or
ineng-tf@venera.isi.edu.
(again, the lists are identical.)
The interest list, of course, includes the main list. The
only usage for the main list at this time will be to announce
specific meeting details (ie, time, date, place). The
interest list will get announcements of upcoming meetings but
details will be lacking so that anyone wishing to attend will
need to request information. This will act as a primative
registration procedure, which may have to improved in the
future.
So let me repeat, in the interest of giving widest exposure to
the task force discussions, please address all mail in the
future to the interest lists.
2) At the last meeting, we decided to start a draft document
series to act as a clearinghouse for Task Force papers and
proposed RFC's. There are now four files in the <ietf>
directory at sri-nic.arpa, which represent 3 TF documents and
an index of the documents. These files are available by
anonymous ftp in the usual way. The four files are:
IDEA.INDEX - Index of the current or upcoming documents
residing in the <ietf> directory at sri-nic.arpa. All
files are available by anonymous ftp in the usual way.
IDEA002.txt - `A Comparison of "Link State" and "Distance
Vector" Routing Algorithms', Ross Callon (BBN)
Title is self-explanatory.
IDEA003.txt - `Guidelines for the use of Internet-IP addresses
in the ISO Connectionless-Mode Network Protocol',
Ross Callon (BBN) and Hans-Werner Braun (U Mich)
Update of RFC-986, which proposes a mapping for DoD
Internet Addresses on the ISO OSI addressing format.
IDEA004.txt - `Routing Information Protocol', Chuck Hedrick
(Rutgers)
Westine [Page 17]
Internet Monthly Report December 1987
Description of the Routing Information Protocol (RIP)
(IDEA001.txt, a description of the goals, history, charter
and organization of the Internet Engineering Task
Force, is in preparation.)
This is essentially an administrative mechanism meant to help
streamline the RFC review process within the IETF. There are
already about 4 other documents already in the IDEA pipeline,
in degree of preparation. Anyone wishing to register a good
IDEA, contact me or one of the working group chairs.
3) The date of the next IETF is March 1-3 in San Diego. Those
wishing more information should send to ietf-
request@gateway.mitre.org.
Phil Gross (Gross@MITRE.GATEWAY.ORG)
INTERNET MANAGEMENT
No report received.
PRIVACY
Work proceeded during December on revision of RFC-989 per
discussions at Privacy Task Force meetings during 1987; it is
anticipated that an updated RFC will be distributed in January
1988. Scheduling of the next task force meeting for 2-3
March, 1988 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was
confirmed.
John Linn (Linn@CCY.BBN.COM)
ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY
No report received.
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING
No report received.
Westine [Page 18]
Internet Monthly Report December 1987
SECURITY
No report received.
TACTICAL INTERNET
No report received.
TESTING AND EVALUATION
No report received.
Westine [Page 19]