MAY 1991
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 Internet information purposes only, and is not
to be quoted in other publications without permission from the
submitter.
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).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTERNET ACTIVITIES BOARD
IAB MESSAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3
INTERNET RESEARCH REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 4
AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 4
END-TO-END SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5
INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5
Westine [Page 1]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Internet Projects
BARRNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 6
BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 6
CICNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8
CORNELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 8
EDUCOM NATIONAl NETWORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 9
FEDERATION OF AMERICAN RESEARCH NETWORKS (FARNET) . . . . page 11
ISI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 12
JVNCNET, NORTH EAST RESEARCH REGIONAL NETWORK . . . . . . page 14
LOS NETTOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 15
MERIT/MICHNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 15
NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK . . . . . . . . page 17
NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . page 18
NSFNET BACKBONE, MERIT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 18
NDRE and NTA-RD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 19
PREPNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 19
SAIC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 20
SRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 21
TEXAS HIGHER EDUCATION NETWORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22
UCL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22
UDEL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 22
DIRECTORY SERVICES ACTIVITIES
DIRECTORY SERVICES MESSAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23
IETF OSIDS & DISI WORKING GROUPS. . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23
FOX - FIELD OPERATIONAL X.500 PROJECT . . . . . . . . . . page 24
ISI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24
MERIT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 24
PSI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 25
SRI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 25
ISO/CCITT DIRECTORY EDITING MEETING - SYNOPSIS . . . . . page 25
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY. . . . . . page 27
PARADISE PROJECT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 27
PSI DARPA/NNT X.500 PROJECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29
PSI WHITE PAGES PILOT PROJECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29
SG-D MHS-MD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 30
X.400 PILOT PROJECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 31
Westine [Page 2]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
IAB MESSAGE
MINUTES
The minutes of the January 1991 IAB meeting are now available for
anonymous FTP from host venera.isi.edu with pathname
pub/IABmins.jan91.txt. A separate file named
pub/IABmins.jan91Arch.txt summarizes a day-long discussion of the
future of the Internet architecture by the IAB and IESG.
STANDARDS ACTIONS:
1. OSPF
Following IESG recommendation, the IAB has approved Draft
Standard state for the OSPF interior gateway protocol. The IETF
has accumulated and documented significant field experience with
multiple implementations of this protocol. The extensive
documents describing operational deployment of OSPF and
analyzing the protocol will be published as informational RFCs.
The IAB notes that this advance is part of the normal evolution
of a new protocol, and does not constitute a recommendation or
requirement. The issue of which IGP should be selected as the
"common" IGP will be taken up by the July IETF meeting in
Atlanta, GA.
2. IPX over IP
Following IESG recommedation, the IAB has approved Proposed
Standard state for a specification for the encapsulation within
IP of the Novell protocol suite IPX. The IAB notes that this
does not constitute any endorsement of IPX, nor is IPX itself
being considered for Internet standardization. Although we
would prefer commonality and interoperability in all protocol
layers, standardization of encapsulation of other protocol
suites in IP is desirable and useful to the community.
3. Other
The IAB has taken the following additional standards actions
since April 1991, following IESG recommendations:
o Proposed Standard state for the OSPF MIB.
o Proposed Standard state for Interface Extension MIB
[RFC-1229].
Westine [Page 3]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
o Proposed Standard state for AppleTalk MIB.
4. Summary of RFCs
The editorial process for RFC publication generally follows
approval by the IAB, so we cannot generally give an RFC number
when an IAB action is announced. The following list shows the
RFC numbers for the specification documents resulting from IAB
actions since January 1991.
* IP-over-ARCNET to Proposed Standard state: RFC-1201.
* IP-over-SMDS to Proposed Standard state: RFC-1209.
* Concise MIB definitions to Proposed Standard state: RFC-1212.
* (SNMP) MIB II to Draft Standard state: RFC-1213.
* OSI Internet Management MIB II to Proposed Standard state:
RFC-1214.
* PPP Extension to Bridging to Proposed Standard state:
RFC-1220.
* POP3 to Draft Standard state: RFC-1225.
* 802.4 Token Bus MIB to Proposed Standard state: RFC-1230.
* 802.5 Token Ring MIB to Proposed Standard state: RFC-1231.
* DS1 MIB to Proposed Standard state: RFC-1232.
* DS3 MIB to Proposed Standard state: RFC-1233.
* OSI CLTS over UDP to Proposed Standard state: pending.
Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU)
INTERNET RESEARCH REPORTS
-------------------------
AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS
-------------------
No progress to report this month.
Deborah Estrin (Estrin@USC.EDU)
Westine [Page 4]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
END-TO-END SERVICES
-------------------
No progress to report this month.
Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU)
INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS
----------------------------
No progress to report this month.
Phill Gross (pgross@NIS.ANY.NET)
Westine [Page 5]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
INTERNET PROJECTS
-----------------
BARRNET
-------
Three new connections were added in May, including one T1, one
56kbps, and one dial-in, bringing the total number of connected
members to 87. One 9600 bps dial-in was converted to a dedicated
line. Four new members were approved, including Santa Clara
University and St. Mary's College, with the connections to be
completed in the coming month or two. A T1 line was installed
between Stanford University and the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, which will give high-speed connectivity to sites in the
Monterey area when it is activated in June.
Paul Baer (baer@jessica.stanford.edu)
BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC.
----------------------------
Inter-Domain Policy Routing
During the month of May we have been working on producing two
Internet drafts: one detailing how to configure an administrative
domain for inter-domain policy routing and one describing policy-
based resource allocation. A draft of the configuration document
will be circulated to the IDPR working group for review during
June.
Terrestrial Wideband Network (TWBNet) and ST/IP Gateway
Videoconferencing and Simulation
On May 24, a new release of WPS software was installed. The
principal feature of this version is the addition of "streams"
(trunk-line bandwidth reservation). Stream service is useful when
bandwidth requirements are known in advance, and when service
guarantees are needed. By reserving appropriate resources for an
application, the network can meet the application's bandwidth and
delay requirements even in the face of other demands. In this way,
streams allow the TWBNET to support real-time applications such as
conferencing and SIMNET exercises, without letting other traffic
negatively impact them. The other major new feature is the switch
to HAP version 1 (RFC 1221), with backward-compatibility support
for HAP version 0. The new version of HAP contains a "protocol
identifier" field, so that ISO protocols (e.g., CLNP) as well as
Internet protocols (IP, ST, GG) may be used above HAP.
Westine [Page 6]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
During May, conferencing facilities were installed at Los Alamos
National Laboratories (LANL). LANL was the first TWB site to use
the BBN T/20 IP gateway and the Picturetel System 4000 Codec. The
German site was restored to operation this month, following a move
which took it off the network temporarily. There are now eight
conferencing sites -- UCL, BBN, RIACS, ISI, DARPA, Germany, RADC,
and LANL. These sites participated in a total of 15 video
conferences and demonstrations. Of these, two included four sites,
five included three, and the remaining eight were point to point.
Conferences were held for discussions in the following areas: the
Security Research Group, the IETF Router Requirements Working
Group, the ALSP project, the London Unix Users Group, LANL
Internetworking projects, Rome Labs multimedia demonstrations, and
the UK Fat-pipe Operational Management Group.
The TWBNet was also used to support three one-day Simnet exercises
between Fort Knox and Fort Rucker.
DARPA Internet / ICBnet Infrastructure Operations and Maintenance
We continue closely monitoring the US-UK FatPipe for any recurrence
of trouble with either the link or the routers. During May the BBN
monitor was able to reach the ULCC router on the Fat Pipe for
44,426 of 44,640 total minutes. This corresponds to a 95.8% uptime
from BBN to ULCC.
We are planning installation of T/20 routers on the US-UK FatPipe
at the end of June. Installation of T/20 routers on a satellite
link from BBN to WPC has been successfully routing IP and ST
traffic since mid-May.
The ICB met at The Hague this month. Three BBNers attended. T/20
routers are slated for installation in ICBnet at RSRE and STC this
summer.
The difficulty with fragmentation reassembly timeouts in the
Butterfly software has become more severe at the FIX East and FIX
West routers. This problem results in loss of EGP updates and
timing out of routes at the FIXes. A T/20 router is slated to
replace the FIX East Butterfly, attached to the US end of the US-UK
FatPipe, but a better interim solution is still needed for the
Butterflys. This problem has been escalated to a higher priority
for resolution and a temporary "fix" has been installed.
Westine [Page 7]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
On May 10th the ICBnet Operations Management Group met via video
conference. There were representitives from BBN, ULCC, Darpa, NRI
and NASA participating. The next OMG meeting is scheduled for
Tuesday June 18th.
Jil Westcott (westcott@bbn.com)
CICNET
-------
The National Science Foundation renewed it's grant to CICNet for
1991-1992. This funding is used to fund the CICNet Network
Operations Center and other services for members.
Three new members joined CICNet during March and April:
- Concordia College, River Forest, Illinois
- Notis Systems, Evanston, Illinois
- The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois
The Concordia connection should be up in June; Notis and the Field
Museum will follow later this Summer. All three will be 56kb
connections.
CICNet President E. Michael Staman attended the April FARNET
meeting in Austin, Texas.
Assistant Director John Hankins gave a presentation on the regional
networks to the conference on Advanced Computing and Information
Technologies for the Social Sciences, which was held in Athens, GA
on April 8th and 9th.
Hankins also talked about regional networks at the Merit Networking
Seminar held in Ann Arbor on May 20 and 21st. Michael Staman and
Kimberly Shaffer of CICNet also participated in the seminar.
J. Paul Holbrook (holbrook@cic.net)
CORNELL
-------
The UMd implementation of OSPF has been merged into gated. Basic
testing was performed although routes were only installed from OSPF
into gated and policy was not yet implemented. A first pass of
full exchange of routing information has been implemented but not
tested.
Westine [Page 8]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Two people will be attending the OSPF interoperability testing at
FTP Software in Wakefield, Mass during the first week of June.
The merge is still rough and much work still needs to be done to
smooth it out, but an alpha release may be available before the end
of June.
Work is also progressing on merging the BSD 4.3 Reno radix tree
based routing table into gated. A version is expected to be
working by the middle of June, but probably will not be available
with the OSPF alpha release.
Jeffrey C. Honig (jch@mitchell.cit.cornell.edu)
EDUCOM NATIONAL NETWORK
-----------------------
A minor milestone in high-speed, long-haul networking happened at
the recent Educom National Net '91 conference in Washington, DC:
TCP transfers from a Cray YMP at Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center to
a Sun Sparcstation-2 on the show floor ran at a sustained rate of
10Mb/s (by `sustained' I mean sustained over hundreds of megabytes
of data transferred -- In one of the first tests, we shipped 256MB
from the PSC to DC in 3.9 minutes). The rough topology was:
FDDI T3 backbone Ethernet
100Mb/s 45Mb/s 10Mb/s
PSC YMP -------> PSC ENSS --....--> DC ENSS ---------> SS-2
The limiting bandwidth was the show ethernet & we ran at that
bandwidth. If we could have gotten in & out of the ENSS at >=
45Mb/s, we would have run at the 45Mb/s NSFNet backbone bandwidth.
(Dave Borman's Cray TCP has been measured at over 300Mb/s. My TCP
on the SS-2 runs 48Mb/s through the loopback interface (i.e.,
copying all the data twice, doing both sides of the protocol &
context switching on every packet) and should easily sink or source
>100Mb/s as soon as Sun comes up with a decent high-speed network
interface.)
The real milestone is that two completely independent
implementations of the RFC1072/RFC1185 "fat pipe" extensions, one
by Dave Borman of Cray Research for Unicos on the YMP & one by me
for an experimental TCP/IP running on the SS-2, interoperated with
no problems. [This gave me no small measure of joy: Sun
demonstrated their normal inability to supply system source to
academic sites & I didn't get a copy of 4.1.1 (the only version of
Sun OS that would run on a SS-2) until Friday of the week before
the show. I spent a very long weekend throwing out Sun's network &
Westine [Page 9]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
IPC code & replacing it with my experimental 4.4BSD stuff and got a
working kernel 45 minutes before the movers came to crate up our
lone Sparcstation-2 & ship it from California to DC. So the very
first chance to test my RFC1072 implementation against Dave
Borman's was when we got the machine uncrated & connected the SS-2
to the show net in DC. I was all resigned to another 36 hours of
sleepless debugging when, to my utter astonishment, the Cray &
Sparcstation flawlessly negotiated a 512KB window & timestamps,
then happily started exchanging data at a very high rate. (Several
other groups were busy setting up their demos. I started up my
usual throughput test programs on the Cray & Sun then looked down
at the "recv" indicator light on the Cabletron transceiver &
noticed it was on solid -- I stared at it for at least 30 seconds &
it didn't even blink. Right after that I heard one of the Cornell
people say "What happened to the network? Our connection seems to
have stopped." and I did my best to look innocent while the test
finished.)]
The big disappointment was that I was worried about what would
happen when the TCP congestion avoidance / recovery algorithms
started interacting with half a megabyte of stored energy (in-
transit data) in the pipe. So I'd spend a bunch of time tuning the
Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery algorithms & had a bunch of
instrumentation set up to watch how they'd perform. But the damn
T3 NSFNet refused to drop packets -- we shipped slightly more than
30GB (roughly 22 million data packets) during the three days of the
show & the kernel network stats said that 6 were dropped.
Naturally, I wasn't watching for any of these 6 & a 0.00003% loss
rate wasn't enough test any of the spiffy new algorithms. Oh well,
maybe next time I'll bring my wire cutters and chop halfway through
the cable to make things a bit more interesting.
[The one interesting piece of behavior had to do with the ethernet
controller on the Sun: The LANCE is a half-duplex device so if it's
receiving back-to-back ethernet packets it will never attempt to
transmit, even if it has data available to send. TCP will attempt
to ack every other packet but, since new data packets were arriving
back-to-back from the ENSS, the ack packets just got queued in the
LANCE on the SS-2. Since the acks can't get out, eventually (after
half a megabyte is sent) the window on the Cray should close, it
should stop sending packets & the SS-2 should get to dump 180
back-to-back ack packets, re-opening the window & restarting the
data flow. This would have resulted in essentially the stop-and-
wait performance of a BLAST protocol but, fortunately, there seems
to be a 128KB buffer somewhere in the T3 NSFNet so after 90 data
packets there was a 30us pause, allowing the SS-2 LANCE to grab the
ethernet, dump 45 back-to-back acks, then start collecting the next
90 data packets. So the window on the Cray never shut & the pipe
Westine [Page 10]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
stayed full -- due to essentially an engineering mistake in the
network (a transcontinental T3 run at T3 needs at least half a meg
of buffer everywhere a queue can form). This, incidentally, is one
reason why we used a half megabyte window instead of the 80KB
window required to fill a 36ms RTT into 10Mb bandwidth-delay
product.]
Anyway, I'm writing this mostly to document that it happened & to
thank all the people at LBL, PSC, Merit, Cray & Sun that made it
happen. I'm particularly grateful to Dave Borman for some great
Cray TCP software and to Geoff Baehr at Sun for battling with the
lawyers and getting us the system pieces we needed (it's nice to
know that at least part of Sun still ranks engineering over bean
counting). And I am eternally grateful to Wendy Huntoon of PSC &
Elise Gerich of Merit who put in long, long hours to get the new
and almost untested PSC & NSF T3 connections up & running, then
kept everything running smoothly and essentially trouble free for
the entire show.
Van Jacobson (van@ee.lbl.gov)
FEDERATION OF AMERICAN RESEARCH NETWORKS (FARNET)
-------------------------------------------------
FARNET held a plenary meeting April 30-May 1 in Austin, Texas,
hosted by the University of Texas. In addition to the FARNET
members, fifteen educators from the pre-college and special
education community were present to describe educational
applications using the Internet. These ranged from international
studies of global change to a multi-school contest to determine the
most efficient way to make 1,000 egg rolls. The educators were
excited to discover one another, and the FARNET members were
excited about extending service to more school districts. FARNET
has formed a K-12 working group to continue activities in this
area.
FARNET has received funding to pursue several programmatic goals in
the coming year, from the National Science Foundation and Advanced
Networks & Services, Inc. The goals include improving end-user
services in the Internet, coordinating and advancing K-12
activities, and collecting and disseminating information about the
use of the Internet to a broad audience. These programs will be
conducted in cooperation with other organizations to maximize
efficiency; if your organizaiton is interested in cooperating,
please contact breeden@farnet.org.
Laura Breeden accepted a position as Executive Director of FARNET,
effective May 28. She was formerly with BBN, where she was manager
Westine [Page 11]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
of the network services group. She will be setting up offices for
FARNET in the Boston area.
Through NYSERNet, Inc., FARNET has received an NSF grant to hold a
workshop to articulate the position of the mid-level networks on
the funding and management of the NSFNET backbone after the current
agreement with MERIT, Inc. expires in November 1992. This
workshop will be held in August; results will be made public in
September, upon completion of the final report to NSF.
FARNET representatives attended the joint RARE/EARN conference in
Blois, France in May. Reports of that meeting will be available
later this summer.
Laura Breeden (breeden@farnet.org)
ISI
---
GIGABIT NETWORKING
Greg Finn wrote a paper that describes the use of single chip
point-to-point transmit technology to create a LAN and then to use
that LAN internally within an architecture to eliminate
communications bottlenecks. Essentially, the capacity of a point-
to-point technology scales with the number of attached nodes. This
becomes attractive when considering emerging transfer intensive
applications such as video conferencing, multimedia and distributed
computing.
Greg Finn (Finn@isi.edu)
INFRASTRUCTURE
12 RFCs were published.
RFC 1222: Braun, H-W, (SDSC), Y. Rekhter, (IBM) "Advancing The
Nsfnet Routing Architecture", May 1991.
RFC 1223: Halpern, J. "OSI CLNS and LLC1 Protocols on Network
Systems HYPERchannel", NSC, May 1991.
RFC 1224: Steinberg, L., "Techniques for Managing Asynchronously
Generated Alerts", IBM Corporation, May 191.
RFC 1225: Rose, M., (PSI) "Post Office Protocol - Version 3",
May 1991.
Westine [Page 12]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
RFC 1226: Kantor, B., "Internet Protocol Encapsulation of AX.25
Frames", UC San Diego, May 1991.
RFC 1227: Rose, M., "SNMP MUX Protocol and MIB", Performance
Systems International, May 1991.
RFC 1228: Carpenter, G., and B. Wijnen, "Simple Network
Management Protocol", T.J. Watson Research Center,
IBM, May 1991.
RFC 1229: McCloghrie, K., (Hughes), R. Fox (Synoptics)
"Extensions to the Generic-Interface MIB", Hughes,
May 1991.
RFC 1230: McCloghrie, K., (Hughes), R. Fox (Synoptics)
"IEEE 802.4 Token Bus MIB", May 1991.
RFC 1231: McCloghrie, K., (Hughes), R. Fox (Synoptics),
E. Decker (Cisco) "IEEE 802.5 Token Ring MIB",
May 1991.
RFC 1232: Baker, F., (ACC), C. Kolb, (PSI) "Definitions of
Managed Objects for the DS1 Interface Type",
May 1991.
RFC 1233: Cox, T., and K. Tesink, "Definitions of Managed
Objects for the DS3 Interface Type", Bell
Communications Research, May 1991.
Ann Westine (Westine@ISI.EDU)
MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING
The SPARCstation version of the Voice Terminal (VT) program, the
packet audio component of our teleconferencing system, is now
working successfully with ST-II, as well as with UDP plus IP
multicasting. This is a result of tests conducted this month with
BBN to debug both VT and BBN's socket-based ST-II (RFC 1190)
implementation for the SunOS kernel. We went through several
iterations of building kernels with ST-II modules provided by BBN
combined with Van Jacobson's DARTnet router modules. In a large-
scale experiment on DARTnet, we ran the ST kernel on all the
DARTnet routers and ran VT at all seven leaf nodes; ISI and BBN
communicated with live voice data while the other sites competed
with continuous traffic generated automatically by VT.
Steve Casner, Annette DeSchon, Eve Schooler (casner@ISI.EDU,
deschon@ISI.EDU, schooler@ISI.EDU)
Westine [Page 13]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
JVNCNET, NORTH EAST RESEARCH REGIONAL NETWORK
---------------------------------------------
General information is available on-line from nisc.jvnc.net. Use
"telnet nisc.jvnc.net", username "nicol" and no password.
Network availability as of Wednesday, May 22 is 99.9% and it
reflects the highest uptime within the past six-month interval
(Dec. 1990 to May 1991). The average for this same statistical
interval is 99.66%.
The traffic for April was 3,657,230,449 (total in plus out packets)
and this number represents an increase of 7.04% over March.
An additional Dialin'Tiger backbone node was installed in Newark,
NJ. Other Dialin'Tiger backbone nodes include Princeton, NJ;
Trenton, NJ; New York, NY; and New Haven, CT. Installation of the
cisco CSC-3 processors for the backbone upgrade is in progress.
Terminal servers were installed in the backbone nodes for added
dial-in out-of-band diagnostics.
Introduction to Data Networking and TCP/IP, the first in a series
of JvNCnet Symposiums, took place on Friday, May 17,1991 at
Princeton University. The symposium was aimed at network operations
and technical staff of local area networks. This course was
designed as an entry level introduction to TCP/IP networking and
how the operations of a network are performed. Each participant
received Douglas Comer's Internetworking with TCP/IP, Vol. 1,
Second Edition plus selected rfc's (for novice and experienced
Internet users) and articles addressing networking issues such as
LANs. The course consisted of the following subjects:
WHAT IS A NETWORK?
LAN and WAN defined
Member and JvNCnet roles.
WHAT MAKES A NETWORK?
What are a host, terminal server, router, CSU/DSU?
What is the function of the telephone company?
What are an ENS, a POP, a BNS?
TCP/IP
Standard protocol, IP address, packet building and
transport, hops. What to do when something goes wrong.
ISO and its seven layers
Basic troubleshooting, the BNS, Telnet, rlogin, ftp
Westine [Page 14]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Part of the afternoon was spent in explaining how the functions of
operations, installation and maintenance, engineering, and
information services as a whole positively impact data networking
at JvNCnet.
Operation's specialized tools and standardized procedures used to
maintain network performance were identified and described.
Installation & Maintenance explained the use of conducting site
surveys, performing new node installation, field upgrades, site
support, preventative maintenance and procedures of handling
defective equipment.
The engineering discussion centered on maintaining all software
systems as well as maintenance, development, implementation, and
analysis of network performance.
IS concentrated on the function its supports: Liaison to JvNCnet
members, Internet administrator and resource information provider.
IS also maintains specific databases and publishes the Megabytes
newsletter.
The symposium was a great success with respect to the number of
participants and their feedback of the course. Future symposiums
will be scheduled soon. For further symposium program information,
please send email to "nisc@jvnc.net.
The next JvNCnet Regional Meeting will be held on Friday, June 28,
1991 at the Computer Science Building, CS Bowl 104, Olden and
William Streets, Princeton University. Information regarding this
meeting is in development and will be available shortly.
Rochelle Hammer (hammer@nisc.jvnc.net)
LOS NETTOS
----------
Walt Prue attended the Cisco sponsored Networkers '91 event in San
Francisco, May 28-31.
Walt Prue (Prue@ISI.EDU)
MERIT/MICHNET
-------------
Several MichNet staff members spent time at the end of May helping
with the Merit Networking Seminar, a two-day conference about the
Internet which was sponsored by the Merit/NSFNET project and held
Westine [Page 15]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
in Ann Arbor. Along with assisting with audio-visual materials and
technical aspects of the conference, MichNet staff members met with
conference attendees from member organizations, and talked to
attendees from K-12 schools and potential affiliates about MichNet
and it's capabilities.
Al Rogers of the FrEdMail (Free Educational Mail) Foundation, in
Ann Arbor for the Merit Networking Seminars, spent time with the
Merit Engineering staff getting a FrEdMail gateway working between
FrEdMail and MichNet. Like the previous gateway at CERFNET, this
will allow interchange between FrEdMail and the Internet, and
better access for educators throughout Michigan.
Because of MichNet's connection to SprintNet and Autonet, users all
over Michigan and the rest of the United States can have dialup
access to the Internet by calling into one of these networks and
then telnetting from the "Which Host?" prompt. Users will need to
have an authorization account, available from MichNet or several of
our member universities. Authorization service accounts cost $40 to
set up and $35 per month to maintain, plus the applicable network
charges.
For more information contact:
acctmgr@merit.edu (for authorization service accounts)
info@merit.edu (for general information)
Saginaw Valley State University became a Merit member in April,
after having been an affiliate for some time. As part of this
change, we are able to provide public dialin in the Saginaw/Bay
City area.
W. Scott Gerstenberger, Merit Associate Director, chaired a panel
session at the SIGUCCS management conference in April. The session
was entitled "Campus Internetworking Issues - Moving Into a
National Networking Environment". The other panel members were Jane
Caviness (NSF), Tom Gabriele (Western Michigan University), and
Mike Dorl (UW-Madison).
Eric Aupperle, president of Merit, participated in a session at the
Advanced Computing and Information Technologies for the Social
Sciences second annnual meeting. The conference was held 8-10 April
at the Univ. of Georgia, and Aupperle presented a talk entitled
"National Networks," which described Merit's NSFNET activities.
Pat McGregor (patmcg@merit.edu)
Westine [Page 16]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
NEW ENGLAND ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH NETWORK
-----------------------------------------
NEARnet has grown to 75 members.
During the month of May, NEARnet transitioned to the T3 Network,
the MERIT Computer Network is providing T1 backup service through
the NSFnet node in New Jersey.
NEARnet has established a T1 connection with Alternet under a
cooperative agreement with UUNET. Users will have expanded access
to the organizations on both networks.
NEARnet has implemented an automated phone answering system to
handle calls made to the NEARnet hotline.
Over 160 people attended the fourth semi-annual NEARnet Technical
and User Seminar on Friday, May 3, 1991. The seminar was held at
the Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jim Luckett, the executive director and
vice president of NYSERNET spoke about the new and exciting
programs which his regional network is initiating. The technical
session of the seminar consisted of an overview of Usenet news
administration by Rich Salz of BBN. John Curran of the NEARnet
staff also spoke on the subject of LAN/WAN troubleshooting.
The user session consisted of several demonstrations of network
applications including an introduction to the capabilities and
resources available over the Internet by John Rugo of the NEARnet
Staff. Raghu Reddy of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center,
demonstrated the use of a performance measurement tool called
perfview, a program written at PSC that is useful for scientists in
previewing animations before putting them on tape. Joe Blackmon of
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, presented a
demonstration of visualization software tools developed at NCSA and
a video tape of a computer-generated model of a severe
thunderstorm. There was also a demonstration of the Polygen/IBM
QUANTA molecular modeling software package present by Dr. Chris
Ruggles of the Polygen Corporation, and a BBN/Slate demonstration
by Terry Crowley of BBN.
John Rugo (jrugo@bbn.com)
Westine [Page 17]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
NNSC, UCAR/BOLT BERANEK and NEWMAN, INC.
----------------------------------------
Corinne Carroll attended the MERIT Networking Seminar in Ann Arbor,
Michigan. The NNSC distributed additions to chapters 3 and 5 of
the Internet Resource guide.
Corinne Carroll (ccarroll@nnsc.nsf.net)
NSF BACKBONE (Merit)
-------------------
Inbound traffic on the NSFNET T1 infrastructure as measured in
packets totaled 7,564,149,615 packets during the month of May 1991.
This is an increase of .263% over April's inbound traffic of
7,544,331,873 packets. As of the end of May, 2763 networks are
announced to the T1 infrastructure, with 882 registered foreign
nets as part of this total.
Nets passing traffic over the NSFNET T3 infrastructure continue to
increase, numbering 445 at the end of May. Inbound packet traffic
on the NSFNET T3 infrastructure had a lower bound of 1,342,479,220
packets measured; technical difficulties resulted in the complete
loss of traffic data for four days on all nodes.
Currently, a single point of interconnection located at Ann Arbor
exists between the T1 and T3 networks. A second interconnection
point is being completed at San Diego, with implementation in June.
NCSA, SDSC and Merit are conducting studies to evaluate Cray to
Cray performance over the T3 infrastructure. Questions being
addressed include the degree to which application performance is
enhanced by T3.
NSFNET is soliciting regional and national networks to participate
in an OSI demonstration for InterOp '91. Participating networks
must provide a host with OSI applications running over a stack
using CLNP at the network layer, a network pathway from the host to
a router located on a shared network with an NSFNET NSS which
supports passing CLNP packets, and a router on the shared network
with an NSFNET NSS which supports CLNP and ES-IS. Regional and
national networks currently passing CLNP traffic across the NSFNET
are encouraged to join the demonstration. Further information is
available from Sue Hares (skh@merit.edu) of Merit/NSFNET Internet
Engineering.
Guests at the Merit Network Operations Center included Han Keun Hee
of the Systems Engineering Research Institute, Korea Institute of
Science and Technology, and Han Ku Kim, Computer & Systems
Westine [Page 18]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Business, SAMSUNG Electronics. Both Hee and Kim are involved in
building a national Korean network and had particular interest in
the management and operation of the NSFNET. Representatives from
the Defense Communication Agency met with Merit/NSFNET Internet
Engineering and NOC personnel to discuss experiences with BGP and
NOC tools, as they look to upgrade the current MILNET.
Elise Gerich, of Merit/NSFNET Internet Engineering, was the
representative of the NSFNET and North America to the RARE
Networking Conference in Blois, France. Gerich presented two
papers to the conference, "Management and Operation of the NSFNET
Backbone" and "Expanding the Internet to a Global Environment but.
. .How to Get Connected?" Gerich also attended meetings of the
CCIRN and IEPG in Paris on behalf of the NSFNET and North American
networking community.
The Merit Networking Seminar held May 20 and 21 in Ann Arbor, MI
was well received by 79 attendees. Speakers included Paul Evan
Peters, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI);
Jim Knighton, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA; Carol Parkhurst,
ALA-LITA, University of Nevada; Al Rogers, Executive Director,
FrEdMail Foundation; John Hankins, CICNet; Dana Sitzler, MichNet;
Dan Van Belleghem, NSF; Mike Roberts, EDUCOM; and Douglas Van
Houweling, Vice Provost Information Technology Division, University
of Michigan. Information on future seminars is available from
seminar@merit.edu.
Jo Ann Ward (jward@merit.edu)
NDRE and NTA-RD
---------------
For information, there is currently being established a 34 Mbit/sec
research network in Norway as an extension to the existing UNINET.
Both NDRE and NTA-RD will probably by connnected to this new
network.
Anton Leere (leere@ndre.no)
PREPNET
-------
During May, three colleges joined PREPnet. Gettysburg College and
Dickinson College will both be connected to the Harrisburg at
56Kbps, and Muhlenberg College will be connected to the Allentown
hub, also at 56Kbps.
PREPnet NIC (prepnet+@andrew.cmu.edu)
Westine [Page 19]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
SAIC
----
This is SAIC's first contribution to the Internet Monthly Report.
This networking group has participated in Internet activities since
1982 when it was owned by Linkabit. It changed hands to M/A-COM,
and is now part of SAIC. Previous development work has included
EGP, DGP (the Dissimilar Gateway Protocol) and now IDPR (Inter-
Domain Policy Sensitive Routing).
April Activities (withheld from last month's report by mistake):
Testing of the IDPR prototype has continued through April. SAIC
has obtained varying results of performance tests from the work
done by USC. Our results show a larger drop in performance than
was originally reported in USCs testing. Part of this performance
drop appears to be related to the platform on which the
encapsulation protocol is running and some local configuration
differences. Further performance testing will be done when version
2 of the prototype is completed.
During April, a graphic interface was developed at SAIC to aid in
visualizing the operation of the IDPR protocol. Currently
implemented features of the interface are a display of path setup
activities, established paths, and path teardown activities. A
display of virtual gateway status will be available soon.
Work has begun on version 2 of the prototype as a first step to
porting the software to gated. This effort requires 5 steps:
1. Combining the software modules implemented by BBN, SAIC,
and USC into a single process to remove the inter-process
communication overhead.
2. Port of the combined prototype to gated.
3. Provision of a configuration interface consistant with gated.
4. Reorganization of separate databases from the different
functional modules into a single common database.
5. Upgrade of the protocol modules to conform to the most recent
IDPR specification as much as practical.
May Activities:
A preliminary design for the port of the IDPR prototype software is
nearly complete after a careful review of each of the modules.
Westine [Page 20]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
In preparation for the demo, the monitor software was improved and
made more flexible to handle different configurations. VG and PG
summary status is now part of the display.
A cross country demo with four sites -- Sparta and Mitre in McLean,
BBN in Boston and USC -- was planned, but was thwarted by flaky
network connectivity and some software bugs in the prototype
uncovered by the more complex configuration. Despite this setback,
a successful demo of the prototype and a networking tutorial were
held at DCA using only the Mitre and Sparta facilities on June 4th.
Planned activies:
Work on an IDPR MIB will be starting soon. The MIB will not be
implemented until the gated port is begun.
Once the design for the software port is complete, we will begin
re-coding the various modules.
During June we hope to try the cross-country experiment once again.
Woody Woodburn (woody@sparta.com)
SRI
----
The cumulative total of all assigned IP numbers is now 29,866.
There are now a total of 1,278 assigned Autonomous System numbers
(ASNs) assigned.
There are currently a total of 2,843 domains registered with the
NIC, including 63 at the top level, 2,721 at the second level, and
59 third-level MIL domains.
Cumulative IP Network Statistics
Month/Year Class
A B C Total
May. 1991 43 5,026 24,797 29,866
Apr. 1991 43 4,977 25,897 30,917
Mar. 1991 41 4,520 24,572 29,133
Feb. 1991 39 4,347 22,552 26,938
Westine [Page 21]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Jan. 1991 39 4,246 21,731 26,016
Dec. 1990 36 4,305 21,811 26,152
Nov. 1990 35 4,198 21,149 25,382
Mary Stahl (stahl@nisc.sri.com)
THENET
------
As part of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) K-12 networking
program, the Texas Higher Education network will be providing
Internet connectivity this summer for all public schools in Texas.
Tracy LaQuey Parker (T.LaQuey@utexas.edu)
UCL
----
John Crowcroft & Peter Kirstein attended the RARE European
Networking Conference in Blois. They also attended the ICB meeting
at TNO-FEL next to STC in the Hague. Upgrade plans for the ICB
network in Europe and Canada were discussed at length. Wisespread
deployed usagre of Slate for multimedia mail twixt ICB members is
now effective.
A video conference was held on the 30th between UCL and BBN to
demonstrate to the London Unix User Group the feasibility of such
technology.
John Crowcroft (j.crowcroft@CS.UCL.AC.UK)
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
----------------------
We have no significant events to declare this month.
Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU)
Westine [Page 22]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
DIRECTORY SERVICES
------------------
This section of the Internet Monthly is devoted to efforts working to
develop directory services that are for, or effect, the Internet. We
would like to encourage any organization with news about directory
service activities to use this forum for publishing brief monthly news
items. The current reporters list includes:
o IETF OSIDS & DISI Working Groups
o Field Operational X.500 Project
- ISI
- Merit
- PSI
- SRI
o ISO/CCITT Directory Editing Meeting - synopsis
o National Institute of Standards and Technology
o North American Directory Forum
o OSI Implementor's Workshop
o PARADISE Project
o PSI DARPA/NNT X.500 Project
o PSI WHITE PAGES PILOT
o Registration Authority Committee (ANSI USA RAC)
o U.S. Department of State, Study Group D,
MHS Management Domain subcommittee (SG-D MHS-MD)
Steve Hotz (hotz@isi.edu)
DS Report Coordinator
IETF OSIDS & DISI WORKING GROUPS
--------------------------------
Refer to IETF section (above) for additional information regarding
the OSIDS and DISI working groups.
Directory Information Services (pilot) Infra-structure WG
---------------------------------------------------------
Ruth Lang (SRI) and Russ Wright (LBL) have finished the first
round of surveys for their X.500 implementations guide for DISI.
A second survey has gone out, and everything looks on track for
a solid paper for the Atlanta IETF.
Chris Weider (clw@merit.edu)
Westine [Page 23]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
FOX -- FIELD OPERATIONAL X.500 PROJECT
--------------------------------------
The FOX project is a DARPA and NSF funded effort to provide a basis
for operational X.500 deployment in the NREN/Internet. This work
is being carried out at Merit, NSYERNet/PSI, SRI and ISI. ISI is
the main contractor and responsible for project oversight.
ISI
---
ISI organized the May 28 FOX phone conference, which included
participants from all of the FOX contractors and NIST. The
primary topic of this meeting was the status of projects ongoing
at the various sites. Further discussion followed about
establishing milestones for intra-FOX testing, demonstration,
and eventual distribution of FOX sponsored projects. Other
topics of discussion focused on potential Internet requirements
for large distributed X.500 services, and the suitability of
X.500 for bibliographic indexing applications.
Steve Hotz (hotz@ISI.EDU)
MERIT
-----
This month Merit worked on representing "information resources"
in an x.500 directory. This will include information about
NICs, K-12 resources, and general online information. The UofM
folks will start work to modify their MaX500 application to
handle our object classes for these resources. We have been
communicating with folks from Educom about the K-12 resources
and with the NISI group about NIC information.
An internet draft is in progress to document the resources
schema definitions.
Some specific activities related to the FOX project: we have
been working to install some upgrades to quipu from Tim Howes,
and have ordered a Sparc 2 to serve as another DSA for FOX
activities.
Chris Weider (clw@merit.edu)
Mark Knopper (mak@merit.edu)
Westine [Page 24]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
PSI
---
An alpha-release version of an X.500-based tool to provide
simple document retrieval capabilities on RFCs and FYI documents
was completed, and has been made available to the participants
of the FOX project.
Wengyik Yeong (yeongw@psi.com)
SRI
---
SRI completed efforts to provide access to WHOIS information
through the White Pages Pilot Project (o=Internet@ou=WHOIS).
The Northern Swift Fox DSA offers Individual, Computer, Network,
Domain, Autonomous System, Organization, and Group information.
A request to add WHOIS schema extensions to the Cosine and
Internet X.500 Schema will be made in June.
Custos 0.1.1 (NIST) was retrieved and compiled. Testing has
uncovered some ISODE version related problems: Custos has been
developed and tested with ISODE 6.0 while SRI is running version
6.8. These problems are being addressed by NIST and SRI.
Survey responses for the DISI X.500 implementation catalogue
were collected and collated. We have received approximately 20
responses thus far. The DISI group is reviewing submissions.
Comments will be fed back to authors in June. The editors, Russ
Wright (LBL) and Ruth Lang (SRI), are aiming to have a rough
draft of the entire document completed for DISI review by the
end of June.
SRI provided input to Brad Harrison of DEC Professional
regarding the DISI X.500 implementation survey. Harrison's
article will appear in their July issue.
Ruth Lang (rlang@nisc.sri.com)
ISO/CCITT DIRECTORY EDITING MEETING - SYNOPSIS
----------------------------------------------
An International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and
International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee
(CCITT) collaborative editing meeting on the Open Systems
Interconnection (OSI) Directory was held in Phoenix, Arizona from
22 April to 3 May 1991 with representatives from ten countries
attending. The National Body and Liaison Organization ballot
Westine [Page 25]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
comments on the Committee Draft (CD) and twelve Proposed Draft
Amendments (PDAM) that were completed at the October 1990 meeting
in Ottawa were resolved. All thirteen revised documents will be
circulated for balloting at the same level on 3 June 1991. This
ballot will close on 3 September and an editing meeting to consider
comments will take place in Berlin in October, 1991. Draft
International Standard (DIS) output is expected from the Berlin
meeting.
The replication and access control models are considered stable;
however, the Directory and Directory System Agent (DSA) models,
abstract services, and distributed operations parts of the standard
need to be aligned with the replication and access control models.
The most controversial decision concerning replication was the
choice of the Reliable Transfer Service Element (RTSE) for recovery
for replication. Some members of ISO do not believe that RTSE fits
the OSI model. However, the Directory Group believes that it is
the only solution practical for the 1992 standard.
Going into the meeting, the documents for distributed operations
and schema (directory models) needed the most work. At the
previous meeting in Ottawa, U.S. participants had concentrated on
the replication and access control documents. The U.S. position is
that all documents must progress together, so a major effort was
made this time to revise the distributed operations and schema
PDAMs.
Document Summary:
The CDs and PDAMs being prepared for ISO balloting are listed
below. The official titles are listed with the descriptive titles
shown in brackets followed by reference number and JTC1/SC21
number.
Replication, Schema, and Access Control [Overview]
ISO/IEC 9594-1/2nd PDAM-1 #5942
Schema Extensions [Directory Models]
ISO/IEC 9594-2/2nd PDAM-2 #5943
Replication [DSA Models]
ISO/IEC 9594-2/2nd PDAM-3 #5944
Replication, Schema, and Enhanced Search [Abstract Service]
ISO/IEC 9594-3/2nd PDAM-2 #5945
Replication, Schema, and Enhanced Search [Distributed Operation]
ISO/IEC 9594-4/2nd PDAM-2 #5946
Replication [Protocol Specifications]
ISO/IEC 9594-5/2nd PDAM-1 #5947
Schema Extensions [Selected Attribute Types]
ISO/IEC 9594-6/2nd PDAM-1 #5948
Westine [Page 26]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Schema Extensions [Selected Object Classes]
ISO/IEC 9594-7/2nd PDAM-1 #5949
Replication ISO/IEC 2nd CD 9594-9 #5951
Access Control ISO/IEC 9594-2 3rd PDAM-1 #5952
Access Control ISO/IEC 9594-3 3rd PDAM-1 #5953
Access Control ISO/IEC 9594-4 3rd PDAM-1 #5954
Access Control ISO/IEC 9594-8 2nd PDAM-1 #5955
Ella Gardner (epg@gateway.mitre.org)
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY
----------------------------------------------
On May 22nd NIST provided an interim release of the Custos X.500
software to the current Custos community. Release 0.1.1
incorporates:
o changes for DAP interoperability with QUIPU and the
OSIWARE X.500 product,
o some restructuring of the database tables to support
enhanced search performance,
o improvements in a few areas such as correct handling
of the root and more latitude in the configuration of
context prefixes, and,
o a number of bug fixes.
The third meeting of the government-wide X.500 Pilot, sponsored by
GSA and NIST, is scheduled for June 18th. Work is focused on
further extensions to the draft schema document.
Richard Colella (colella@osi.ncsl.nist.gov)
PARADISE
--------
The central DSA is being closely monitored. A cause of the
"watchdog" problem reported last month has been found (X.25
RESETs). A patch has been applied to the DSA software, but this
appears to only partly fix the problem. A new fix is being worked
on.
Belgium, Ireland and Israel have now joined the pilot (see below),
although access to all three countries has not been good. There
have been further interoperability tests with the French PIZARRO
implementation, but there is currently a problem at the
Westine [Page 27]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
presentation level of the OSI stack which is being looked into.
The first version of the "de" interface for the Central DUA service
is now ready and being tested by the project. It will be made
available to the PUNTERS group for beta testing and to elicit
comments in the second week of June.
A version of the software for a packaged DSA based upon ISODE is
now ready, and will be made available for delivery once it has been
decided whether to go with version 6.8, or to wait for the next
full release, 7.0, which is expected very soon.
The project produced the PARADISE International Report in both
electronic and brochure form. The brochure was made available for
the RARE Networking Conference held at Blois, France from 13-16
May. It is hoped to repeat the report every six months with
electronic updates maintained regularly.
A locality node, l=Europe, was set up with the intention of
establishing a base for European multinational organizations to
provide pointers to organizational entries below the country level
of more than one European country.
Site Reports:
The Belgian DSA is based at the University of Brussels and is
managed by Nils Meulemans running a QUIPU DSA (cn=Woolly Spider
Monkey).
The Israeli DSA (cn=Dorcan Gazelle) is based at the Hebrew
University in Givat Ram, Jerusalem and managed by Juliana Solomon.
The Irish Root DSA (Irish Elk) joined the global DIT this month.
This DSA is running at Trinity College in Dublin and uses DEC X.25
Access for Ultrix to connect to IXI. Network performance is a
problem, but the links are being upgraded soon. Currently there
are only about 100 entries pertaining to the local site, but we
hope that other universities and research institutions will be
included later in the year. Any queries should be addressed to
Donal O'Mahony (omahony@cs.tcd.ie).
Portugal
The Portuguese Pilot Directory Project is managed at the University
of Minho, Data Communications Centre of the Department of
Informatics, under a contract with FCCN (Fundacao de Calculo
Cientifico Nacional), the national foundation in charge of the
Portuguese Academic Network (RCCN).
Westine [Page 28]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
The Pilot Directory Project started in May 1991 and its plan
consists of four phases:
o installation of a master DSA for PT, local connectivity
tests with DSP and DAP protocols, interfaces with e-mailers
and connection to the European PARADISE pilot (May-July, 1991)
o preparation phase: definition of the DIT structure,
collection of information for the pilot service on a
limited and selected scope and the gathering of experience
in the management of the service (June-August, 1991)
o distribution phase: set-up of DSAs in other sites
(Universities and R&D Laboratories) and connectivity
tests (September-November, 1991)
o production phase: use in the RCCN (December 1991 - ...)
Contacts for the Portuguese Pilot Directory Project are Joaquim
Macedo (macedo@uminho.pt) and Fernando Pinto (fernando@uminho.pt).
David Goodman (d.goodman@cs.ucl.ac.uk)
PARADISE Project Manager
PSI DARPA/NNT X.500 PROJECT
---------------------------
In response to substantial comments received on NADF-123, revisions
were made to the document, which will be submitted in revised form
at the upcoming North American Directory Forum meeting.
Development is under way on an MSDOS front-end to the information
available in the PSI White Pages Project. It is intended that this
software tool will eventually provide access to White Pages
information from IBM PCs and compatibles that support FTP Software
Inc.'s PCTCP stack.
Wengyik Yeong (yeongw@psi.com)
PSI WHITE PAGES PILOT PROJECT
-----------------------------
As of June 4, 1991, there are 75 organizations participating in the
White Pages in the United States of America.
New organizations added in the past month are:
University of Pennsylvania
Westine [Page 29]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Oakland University
In an effort to improve the general level of service afforded by
the White Pages, organizations whose DSAs had longstanding
reachability problems were 'pruned' from c=US. The following
organizations have been deleted from the c=US arc of the DIT:
Advanced Decision Systems
Carnegie Mellon University
NCI
National Institute of Health
University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Rochester
Beta testing was completed on a front-end to the PSI White Pages
for the Macintosh. Version 1.0 of this shareware software is now
available for anonymous ftp from uu.psi.com [136.161.128.3] in
pilot/PSIWP.Hqx. This shareware has also been contributed to the
USENET group comp.binaries.mac.
Wengyik Yeong (yeongw@psi.com)
SG-D MHS-MD
-----------
SG-D MHS-MD just concluded a meeting held at the State Dept. in
Washington, DC.
Progress includes the revision of the draft procedures for MHS MD
name registration. A tentative agreement was reached on the
structure for resolving how ANSI registered national standing names
can be used for MHS MD names, and also used as a "stem" for
constructing names using a construction syntax to build additional
nationally unique names for use as MHS MD names. This tentative
resolution is to be fleshed out in the draft procedures for review
and discussion at the next meeting on September 16-17 at the US
Dept. of State in Washington.
A discussion of the issues regarding how to organize a US National
MTS (backbone) network of ADMD service providers was opened. This
involves consideration of various alternative schemes; among them
is an arrangement similar to that advocated in the UK scheme, which
uses <single-blank> value for the ADMD name. We are soliciting
contributions on this topic.
SG-D MHS-MD is not yet focusing on issues of Directory Services.
Einar Stefferud (stef@ics.uci.edu)
Westine [Page 30]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
X.400 PILOT PROJECT
-------------------
T H E 4 0 0
Internet X.400 Pilot Project Newsletter No 2
May 17 1991
Queries to:
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=UW-Madison; OU=cs; S=x400-project-team
x400-project-team@pilot.cs.wisc.edu
Phone: +1 608 262 5084
Fax: +1 608 262 9777
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
1210 West Dayton Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
=======================================================================
THIS IS OUR SECOND NEWSLETTER
-----------------------------
This Newsletter will on a regular basis inform you about the recent
developments in our project. The information is intended for
- Organizations already participating in the experimental Internet
X.400 service.
- Organizations that may be interested in joining either as an MTA
under PRMD=XNREN or as a subscriber to other PRMDs in the
Internet.
- Any other interested parties.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The project is maintaining a file store of documents.
-----------------------------------------------------
Internet X.400 documents are available by anonymous FTP from a file
store maintained by the Internet X.400 Pilot Project in Wisconsin.
Login with the username "anonymous" and password "guest" on the
machine mhs-relay.cs.wisc.edu (128.105.8.53). After logging in,
position yourself to the correct directory:
type "cd pub" to find this catalog
type "cd pub/argo" to find information about the ARGO X.400
implementation.
type "cd pub/doc" to find the documents describing the current
operational documentation of the pilot Internet
X.400 service.
Westine [Page 31]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
type "cd pub/gen" to find general information resulting from the
Internet X.400 project.
type "cd pub/ietf" to find documents related to the IETF X.400
Operations WG.
Type "ls" to get a list of documents.
If you are a newcomer, the documents marked as 1 2 3 4 contain
background material and should be read first. The following files
are available:
Last modified Filename Explanation
------------------------------------------------------------------------
pub/
May 17 1991 catalog.txt This catalog file.
pub/argo/
*** Contains information about the ARGO X.400 implementation.
Apr 9 1991 argo-info.txt General information.
Apr 9 1991 sysadmin.n System adm. aspects.
Apr 9 1991 sysadmin.out
Apr 9 1991 users.n User facilities.
Apr 9 1991 users.out
pub/doc/
*** Contains documents and information about documents describing
the pilot
*** Internet X.400 service. Intended for service managers.
May 1 1991 country-us-prmds List of Internet PRMDs.
May 15 1991 doc-info.txt Info about the documents.
May 1 1991 format-documents.txt Formal format description.
May 16 1991 i-wep Description of I-WEPs.
Apr 18 1991 mta-us Description of MTAs.
Apr 17 1991 org-us Description of Organizations.
Apr 2 1991 rfc987-mapping1 Current address mapping tables.
Apr 2 1991 rfc987-mapping2
pub/gen/
*** General information resulting from the Internet X.400 project.
Feb 13 1991 88-to-84-downgrading-kille.txt
Feb 13 1991 dns-987.ps Draft RFC for use of DNS to
Feb 13 1991 dns-987.txt Manage RFC 987 mapping info.
Jan 25 1991 4 how-to-join.txt Info on how to join the service
Feb 13 1991 ixom-minutes-nov-28-90.txt Initial meeting in Madison.
Feb 13 1991 mhs-md-1st-meeting-rep.txt MHS-MD is a subgroup of the
Feb 13 1991 mhs-md-1st-meeting-slides.txt U.S. CCITT study group D.
Apr 9 1991 mhs-md-2nd-meeting-rep.txt
Jan 14 1991 na-form.txt XNREN X.400 registration form.
Westine [Page 32]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Jan 14 1991 na-statutes.txt Statutes XNREN Naming Authority
Jan 14 1991 1 newsletter-1.txt Newsletter, 1st issue.
May 17 1991 2 newsletter-2.txt Newsletter, 2nd issue.
Jan 14 1991 3 prospectives.txt Prospectives for X.400 organiz.
pub/ietf/
*** Contains documents related to the IETF X.400 Operations WG.
Feb 18 1991 agenda-st-louis-march-12-13-91.txt
Apr 9 1991 cdc-x500-usage.txt CDC product's X.500 usage.
Feb 13 1991 charter.txt IETF X.400 OPS WG charter.
May 13 1991 i-wep-def.txt Draft definition of I-WEP.
Apr 5 1991 minutes-st-louis-march-12-13-91.txt
Apr 9 1991 rfc-987-multimedia-ext.txt Contribution from CDC.
Feb 13 1991 status-cdc.txt Input to St. Louis meeting.
Feb 13 1991 status-xnren.txt Input to St. Louis meeting.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Documents are located at:
o CS-Department, UW-Madison
Address: mhs-relay.cs.wisc.edu (128.105.8.53)
For questions, please mail to
c=us; admd= ; prmd=xnren; o=UW-Madison; ou=cs; pn=postmaster
postmaster@pilot.cs.wisc.edu
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What has happened since November 90?
------------------------------------
IETF:
The IETF X.400 Operations WG meeting in St. Louis, March 12-13 1991,
showed that there is a great interest in X.400 operations in the
Internet community. Some major draft decisions were made in St. Louis:
1) The WG agreed on an X.400/RFC-822 address mapping scheme for the US
Internet community (will be described later in this Newsletter).
2) A minimum solution for X.400 routing, using a structure of I-WEPs,
was adopted.
3) Documents in the Internet X.400 Documentation will be used as a
mechanism to describe and ensure end-user X.400 connectivity over
different underlaying network protocol suites (RFC-1006/TCP/IP -
TP-0/X.25 - TP-4/CLNP)
Westine [Page 33]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
4) An outline of a new RFC: "Requirements for Internet PRMDs," was
drafted.
The project team will produce the draft RFC described in 4) to be
reviewed at the next IETF in Atlanta (July 29 - August 2 1991).
OPERATIONAL STATUS:
The draft decisions made on address mapping, routing and documentation
are to be implemented by the pilot operational Internet X.400 services
now comprising 4 operational PRMDs: ARC, CDC, Hughes and XNREN.
The number of real X.400 users is still very low. However with the new
operational PRMDs, the number is growing.
The following organizations are operational and interconnected as X.400
systems. Addressing examples are given in order to show what the X.400
addresses look like. The X.400 addresses are presented both in X.400
Standard Attribute (SA) form and in RFC 822 form.
Organizations,
PRMD XNREN: X.400 address in SA form and RFC 822 form
------------------------------------------------------------------------
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=uw-madison; OU=cs; S=User
User@pilot.cs.wisc.edu
National Science Foundation
Washington, D.C.
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=nsf; PN=User
User@pilot.nsf.gov
Rice University
Houston, TX
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=rice-univ; PN=User
User@exp.rice.edu
Mitre Corporation
McLean, VA
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=mitre; OU=ieg; PN=User
User@pilot.ie.org
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=upenn; OU=cis; PN=User
User@pilot.upenn.edu
Westine [Page 34]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
Organizations,
PRMD Hughes: X.400 address in SA form and RFC 822 form
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hughes Aircraft Company,
Space & Communications Group
Los Angeles, CA
C=us; ADMD=MCI; PRMD=Hughes; O=SCG; OU=whitney; S=User
User@whitney.hac.com
Organizations,
PRMD ARC: X.400 address in SA form and RFC 822 form
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NASA-Ames Research Center
CA
C=us; ADMD=telemail; PRMD=arc; O=nasa; OU=argo; PN=User
User@pilot.arc.nasa.gov
Organizations,
PRMD CDC: X.400 address in SA form and RFC 822 form
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Control Data Corporation
Arden Hills, MN
C=us; ADMD=ATTMail; PRMD=CDC; O=CPG; S=User
User@cpg.cdc.com
These organizations can communicate with X.400 users in the R&D MHS
Service in the following countries:
Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Finland,
France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia.
The project is operating an RFC 987 gateway (PP) between the U.S.
Internet mail service and the international R&D MHS Service (X.400).
This gateway is also the experimental U.S. WEP (WEP = Well known Entry
Point) in the COSINE MHS Service in Europe, and it is directly
connected to other WEPs in Canada, Finland, France, Norway, Spain,
Switzerland and United Kingdom. X.400 traffic to the other countries
in the COSINE MHS Service, is routed via the Norwegian WEP operated by
the UNINETT project.
France, Norway, Spain and Switzerland are routing some of their X.400
initiated traffic destined to the U.S. Internet mail domains, via our
gateway as an experiment. This means that messages initiated in X.400
can be kept in the X.400 "world" all the way to the U.S. and gatewayed
Westine [Page 35]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
here, if necessary. Due to these routing experiments the monthly
traffic through our WEP has increased considerably.
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE:
The project is distributing the ARGO X.400 implementation to
non-commercial organizations, and we are also offering assistance to
organizations who are starting to use the PP X.400/RFC-987 gateway
system from UCL, London. The assistance we offer is limited to
operational issues, initial PP configuration, address mapping tables,
etc. E-mail us if you would like such assistance. General software
support should be obtained from the pp-support team in London.
EXTERNAL PRESENTATIONS:
The project was presented at the 2nd Joint European Networking
Conference in Blois, France, May 13 - 16 1991. "X.400 in the Internet"
will be presented at the INET '91 Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark,
June 17 - 20 1991.
VALUE ADDED SERVICES:
The project team is developing a FAX gateway service between X.400 and
FAX. Status so far is that a text file can be sent to a given fax
number. More work has to be done to develop this into a useful
service allowing end-users to use their X.400 User Agent to send a
text message to a fax- subscriber in the U.S. It is a goal to
negotiate agreements with other countries such that X.400 users in the
U.S. also can send international fax using similar fax gateways in
other countries.
This service, when developed, will be made available for all X.400
users in the Internet X.400 service, and also on a bilateral basis to
X.400 users in other countries.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Westine [Page 36]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
* * * Topic of today: * * *
The "St. Louis decision" on address mapping.
--------------------------------------------
The draft decision in St. Louis is valid for the U.S. Internet, and can
also be viewed as a recommendation for communities outside the U.S.
The address mapping issue can be split into two parts:
1) Specification of RFC-822 addresses seen from the X.400 world. 2)
Specification of X.400 addresses seen from the RFC-822 world.
1) Specification of RFC-822 addresses seen from the X.400 world.
The following is from the St. Louis minutes:
"It was agreed that RFC822 addresses should be expressed using X.400
domain defined attributes. Furthermore, a special PRMD named
"Internet" will be defined to facilitate the specification of RFC822
addresses. For example, an X.400 user will address an RFC822
recipient by constructing an X.400 address such as:
/c=us/admd= /prmd=Internet/dd.RFC-822=user(a)some.place.edu/
Participating MTA's will be configured to recognize "/c=us/admd=
/prmd=Internet/" as a special case. The presence of this address will
cause a message to be routed to a regional RFC987 gateway. In effect,
this special PRMD identifies a community of gateways to RFC822
recipients. This strategy is user friendly in that all users
everywhere need only remember this one address, and it is efficient in
that it avoids having to establish a single, common gateway which
would tend to become a bottleneck and single point of failure."
2) Specification of X.400 addresses seen from the RFC-822 world.
The following is also from the same minutes:
"After considerable discussion, it was agreed that RFC822 users should
be able to address X.400 recipients in RFC822/Internet terms. This
implies the necessity of maintaining and distributing address mapping
tables to all participating RFC987 gateways, at least in the short
term. Other mapping strategies were discussed (loudly and
enthusiastically), but it was shown that these alternate strategies
would sometimes cause messages (or replies to messages) to pass
through more than one gateway. Since this behavior would probably
cause information to be lost in translation, it was quickly agreed
that the alternate strategies were inferior to the good old table
Westine [Page 37]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
driven approach.
Nevertheless, it was also pointed out that some X.400 addresses do not
map cleanly to RFC822 addresses, even when the table driven mapping
strategy is used. For example, X.400 personal names which contain
generation qualifiers, personal names which contain initials but no
given name, and initials which contain periods cannot be mapped to
RFC822 symmetrically such that a reverse mapping is possible.
Similarly, X.400 addresses which contain X.121 address elements
(sometimes used for expressing fax telephone numbers), unique UA
identifiers, or physical addressing attributes cannot be mapped
nicely. Consequently, it will be necessary for RFC987 gateways to
generate RFC987 address syntax occasionally.
It was recommended that our RFC should contain guidelines for the
creation of X.400 personal names. In following these guidelines,
users will avoid creating personal names which can not be mapped
nicely between X.400 and RFC822.
It was generally agreed that long term reliance upon static mapping
tables is unacceptable. Therefore, it was agreed that the X.400
Operations Working Group should devise a strategy for using X.500
directory services instead.
Another option could be to use the DNS system for this purpose, if the
X.500 infrastructure appears to be too premature."
In other words, in most of the cases RFC-822 users will not see the
difference between an RFC-822 address and an X.400 address. Example:
The X.400 address:
C=us; ADMD=ATTMail; PRMD=CDC; O=CPG; S=Jordan; G=Kevin
will from an RFC-822 user look like:
Kevin.Jordan@cpg.cdc.com
The mapping tables in the gateways will describe this mapping.
The other way around, an X.400 user, will normally see the difference of
an X.400 address and an RFC-822 address, because the RFC-822 address
will be using PRMD=Internet and dd.RFC-822 (example):
Westine [Page 38]
Internet Monthly Report May 1991
The RFC-822 address:
ok@subdomain.edu
will from an X.400 user look like:
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=Internet; DD.RFC-822=ok(a)subdomain.edu
The decision to use Domain Defined Attributes (DDAs) requires
modification of the current mapping table coordination procedures
defined by the European RARE-WG1. Such modifications have already been
discussed and some proposals are on the table.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Internet X.400 Project Contact Points:
--------------------------------------
If you need information from the project, please look first in the
catalog.txt file in our file server and check if there are some
documents there that might give you the information you need.
To contact the project team, please use the coordinates in the beginning
of this Newsletter.
The following persons are working on the Internet X.400 Project:
Allan.Cargille@pilot.cs.wisc.edu
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=UW-Madison; OU=cs; S=Cargille; G=Allan
Rob Hagens <hagens@cs.wisc.edu>
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=Internet; DD.RFC-822=hagens(a)cs.wisc.edu
Alf.Hansen@pilot.cs.wisc.edu
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=xnren; O=UW-Madison; OU=cs; S=Hansen; G=Alf
Larry Landweber <lhl@cs.wisc.edu>
C=us; ADMD= ; PRMD=Internet; DD.RFC-822=lhl(a)cs.wisc.edu
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alf Hansen <Alf.Hansen@pilot.cs.wisc.edu> IETF X.400 Operations WG
Chairman.
Westine [Page 39]