Danny Amor's Online Library/Danny Amor's Online Library - Volume 1.iso/bbs/society/society.lha/PUB/isoc_news/2-1/issue2-1-complete.txt

Text File | 1995-07-21 | 148KB | 3,160 lines

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n-2-1-002.01

President's Message

Dear Internauts:

As I write this, there is still a winter chill in the air, but the
promise of Spring is evident in the daffodils poking their hesitant
shoots skyward. Your Internet Society is preparing for the bloom
of Spring, too.

Trustee elections are in preparation and I want to thank Trustee
Geoff Huston and his committee (Member Rob Blokzijl, Trustee Ira
Fuchs, Trustee Tomaz Kalin, Pioneer Member Craig Partridge and
Member Hide Tokuda) for their fine work preparing a slate of a
dozen candidates. In addition, two successful petition candidates
round out the slate to a total of 14 for 6 slots on the Board of
Trustees. Information about the candidates is available on-line and
will be sent with the balloting material later this Spring.

IAB and IESG nominations are in progress and I want to thank
Pioneer Member Jeff Case and his committee (Jack Brown, Pioneer
Member Peter Ford, Pioneer Member Erik Huizer, Trustee Geoff
Huston, Pioneer Member Stephen Kent, Pioneer Member Barry Leiner,
Member Paul Mockapetris, Pioneer Member Craig Partridge, Pioneer
Member Jon Postel, Jim Romaguera, and Pioneer Member Claudio
Topolcic). They are working against an end of March IETF meeting
deadline and their efforts are greatly appreciated.

Internet Society information is now available on-line from a host
at CNRI: ietf.cnri.reston.va.us. Please see the box elsewhere in
this issue for a summary of what is available.

INET '93 is coming up in August. General Chairman Eric Benhamou
advises that there are still opportunities for corporate
sponsorship ([e-mail]). Along these same lines,
those of you whose companies or institutions are not yet
organizational members of the Internet Society should give serious
consideration this year. This year, for the first time, the
Internet Society is sharing costs with the National Science
Foundation, Department of Energy, Advanced Research Projects Agency
and National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the support
of the IETF Secretariat. Organizational sponsorship is essential
to meet this commitment. Contact [e-mail] for
details.

A new committee to explore potential Internet Society involvement
in the use of the Internet in primary and secondary education is
being organized. If you have interests in this area and ideas and
energy to contribute, please contact Bruce Nelson
([e-mail]) or Kathy Rutkowski
([e-mail]).

Finally, I want to remind all of you that the Internet Society is
alert to opportunities to participate in, sponsor or otherwise
encourage conferences and symposia relating to the Internet around
the world. Proposals should be sent to Vice President Larry
Landweber ([e-mail]). The recent Computers, Freedom and
Privacy Conference, IRTF Privacy and Security Research Group
Workshop on Network and Distributed System Security, and Maryland
Workshop on Very High Speed Networks are examples, as are the
upcoming Joint European Networking Conference and National Net '93
Conference.

I look forward greatly to seeing many of you in San Francisco at
INET'93.

Warmest regards,

Vinton G. Cerf

====================================================
n-2-1-003.01

The Internet Peace Corps

by A.M.Rutkowski
<[e-mail]>

Some thirty years ago, U.S. President John F. Kennedy rallied a generation
to a new form of international public service at the grass roots.  The
Peace Corps was created to motivate young and old to provide their own
skills, creativity and energies to make a difference in working with
other peoples around the world.  In an ultimate form of human leveraging,
the Peace Corps measurably improved the condition of countless villages
and millions of people throughout the Third World.  In the process, it
also changed the lives of those who volunteered, and established a proud
new standard of assistance for a nation and the world.

One of the more remarkable attributes of the Internet is the ability for
this enormous network of networks to bring fundamental change and
empowerment to people throughout the world.  One of the more heartening
attributes of the Internet community is the number of individuals and
institutions that have effected a kind of collective virtual Internet
Peace Corps.  Many pages of the Internet Society News have been devoted
to their remarkable efforts and achievements.  Some have literally devoted
their lives to bringing Internet connectivity to technologically developing
countries of the world.  In addition, the Internet Society has begun
working with international health and disaster relief agencies.

This activity began as existing NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) of
many kinds began to use the technology to improve the connectivity of
very low budget operations around the world.  The Institute for Global
Communications was created out of this need.  Activists in many diverse
organizations with international missions - from the UNDP to the U.S. NSF
to France's Orstom organization - then began to fund Internet connectivity
and information infrastructure initiatives as express objectives; bypassing
the tired and trite activities of the more traditional organizations that
produced more paper than infrastructure.

The process unleashed considerable technical and operational creativity
to match prevailing local conditions.  The networks had to be cheap,
easily maintained, robust, and often optimized around enormously
expensive and poorly performing public telecom capabilities.  Far flung
networks based on Unix UUCP or on DOS PCs like FidoNet were born and given
gateways to the Internet.  As the expertise grew and scarce funds were
marshaled, circuits were shared, and full Internet connectivity was obtained.

Governments around the world are now focusing on their national or
regional information infrastructures, and turning the swords of the Cold
War into plowshares.  They are also facing many serious economic constraints.
The current efforts of the new Clinton-Gore Administration are particularly
notable examples.

In these efforts, the enormous value of a more formal Internet Peace Corps
initiative that would bring Internet connectivity and information resources
to Third World locations is worth considering.  Even more than the original
Corps program, it leverages existing resources, people and technologies.
It also captures the imagination and establishes a spirit of global change and
cooperation in ways never before possible.

====================================================
n-2-1.011.10

A Latin American and Caribbean Update
by Daniel Pimienta*,
<pimienta![e-mail]>


REGIONAL

The process of regional integration has been slowly progressing in the
last year; much faster improvements have been made in terms of
sub-regions.  If the very uneven level of institutionalization of the
various national initiatives, and the weaknesses in the coordination
between the different actors of the scientific information circuits
(producers, consumers, carriers) makes the path long and difficult
toward a real regional network integration, the level of mutual
knowledge and cooperation between the people involved in networking
made a spectacular jump in 1992.

The Second Regional Networking Meeting was held last November 1992 in
Guadalajara (Mexico).  It was characterized by an almost exhaustive
representation of national network initiatives and a more reduced
international presence (OAS, UNDP, NSF, and SELA as observers), as
compared to the first meeting in Rio de Janeiro.  The agreed final
text shows a lot of progress toward the regional perspective, and
definition of the key strategical objectives for the region.  The next
meeting, scheduled to be held in Venezuela, in October 1993, should
show the maturation of sub-regional and regional efforts.

The Latin American Networking School of Merida (Venezuela) confirmed
the promises demonstrated during the previous Rio de Janeiro Workshop.
The regional ability to provide a comprehensive and high quality
technical training program has been proven.  One possible area
of improvement could be in completing the curriculum with an
introductory perspective which could sensitize the future network
specialists on users, services and the social impact of networks.

The REDALC regional project feasibility study (EEC funding, Union
Latina, Unesco and Acal partners) was completed by September 1992.
Follow-on actions are being designed and will be soon negotiated with
regional counterparts.  The REDALC team is also putting together, in
collaboration with various partners, a plan for the creation of the
Haitian network before the end of 1993.

NATIONAL

Practically the only country left out of reach from the Internet is
Haiti.  The countries with older experience are starting to get
organized for network applications, while the younger ones are trying
to consolidate their user bases.

The Peruvian net continues to demonstrate its model value in bringing
the focus toward user support and services, and leading regional
actions.  In March 1993, the Networking School will offer regional
services in Lima.  The event celebrates the first birthday of the
Peruvian network and is organized together with various sub-regional or
national activities.

Two important improvements in terms of international connectivity have
been made in Costa Rica and Ecuador, where direct Internet connections
have been set-up.  Both use 64kbps point to point satellite (PAS-1)
connections to the Sprint PanamSat teleport in Homestead, FL and
optical fiber from Sprint to NSF, Washington DC.  Both are offered to
be shared by the different national initiatives, respectively by
Universidad de Costa Rica and Banco del Pacifico (in the last case, it
is a subset of a business bandwidth).

Venezuela is keeping a high user growth rate, and improving its
network architecture with multi protocol support.

The Cuba network (CENIAI) growth in users and services remains
impressive: more than 2000 users are now connected.  CENIAI has
interesting assets to show in the upcoming INET93: the synergistic
relation between telecom authorities and research networks, the
special quality of user support, and the focus in applications.  The
Internet Society has to work to make possible the representation of
CENIAI in San Francisco.


* Redalc Projects Manager

================================================
n-2-1-011.25
Description of the Research Network Initiative in Costa Rica
by Guy F. de Teramond*
<[e-mail]>


Two years after establishing the first Bitnet node in the Central
American region, the University of Costa Rica interconnected last
January 26, twelve nodes to the Internet.  Major activity at present
is aimed at establishing CRNet, a digital high speed national internet
backbone, linking major institutions in the country.  We provide a
description of the research networking activities in Costa Rica,
initiated three years ago.  Completion of this program will enable the
regional scientific community to access remote advanced computing and
information systems, as well as offering information on important
regional aspects such as biodiversity and tropical medicine.

I. Establishment of a Bitnet Node in Costa Rica

A Bitnet node is operational at the University of Costa Rica (UCR)
Centro de Informatica.  The node was connected on November 8th, 1990.
A plan for the installation of a Bitnet node at UCR and the electronic
connection of Central American Scientists was originally presented as
a formal project to the Space Conference of the Americas in March 1990
(1).

With the installation of a 3708 protocol converter and a PBX at ICE
(Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad), and a second 3708 protocol
converter at one of the RACSA (Radiografica Costarricense S.A) X.25
nodes, the system has convenient access from any PC, through the
normal telephone lines, or through a data transmission line from a
RACSA node, in the country or in the Central American region.  The node
at the University of Costa Rica is connected to the node FAUVAX at
Florida Atlantic University (FAU) with a dedicated 19.2 Kbps digital
link of the satellite PAS-1 from Panamsat.  The receiving station of
PAS-1 is located at Homestead, Florida.

The number of registered users of the Bitnet node (UCRVM2) at the
University of Costa Rica has been growing steadily since November
1990, when the node was interconnected.  There is at present some 1500
users, most of them faculty, and students from the University of Costa
Rica.  Some 400 users are outside host members from some 30
institutions and specific research projects.  A Bitnet NJE (Network
Job Entry) link has been established with Panama over a 9.6 anological
link.  The new node UTPVM1 is operational since October 1992.

There also exists a UNDP funded project at the Fundacion Nahual -
Proyecto Huracan - which gives useful electronic mail services within
Central America, also using RACSA X.25 packet switching network, with
a dialup connection of the main node Huracan with a UUCP gateway in
the US.

II. Interconnection to the Internet

The IBM Corporation has given the network project at the University of
Costa Rica a grant which includes a RISC 6000/530 multiprotocol machine,
that is interconnected to the 4381 computers at UCR.  The RISC serves
as hardware platform for the root name server (top domain level of the
Costa Rican Internet).

Bitnet traffic will be combined with native IP traffic by
encapsulating Bitnet RSCS packets into IP datagrams using the VMNET
transport software developed at Princeton University in the 4381 VM
machine, locally migrating to BITNET II.  A 64 Kbps satellite link has
been established to carry the IP traffic to the US.  On March 1, the
19.2 NJE Bitnet link to FAUVAX will be disconnected permanently.

The UCR has already interconnected a dozen nodes to the Internet.
Other nodes at various faculties and laboratories will be soon
interconnected as a router- based fiber local backbone will span
across the university campus.  The Instituto Tecnologico de Cartago has
recently acquired 12 high performance DEC STATION 5000 establishing
also a local internet.

III. Establishment of a National TCP/IP Backbone

In parallel with the Interconnection with the US Internet, the
National Research Network of Costa Rica (CRNet) has been established.
This pioneer project, sponsored by the Ministry of Science and
Technology, for the establishment of an internet backbone within Costa
Rica is based on a proposal to the Agency for International Development
(2).

CRNet is a digital network that will provide high speed local
interconnectivity between scientists at universities, research
laboratories, industries with a technological component and other
national institutions.  CRNet also provides high level
interconnectivity with the US Internet using RACSA and Panamsat
teleport facilities located respectively in San Jose and Homestead
(Florida), and a 64 Kbps digital link from the satellite PAS-1.  The
circuit includes a fiber link from Sprint corporation between
Homestead and the NSFNet gateway in Washington D.C. sponsored by the
National Science Foundation (NSF).

The backbone will initially interconnect the University of Costa Rica
(UCR), the Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica (ITCR), the Centro
Agronomico Tropical de Investigacion y Ensenanza (CATIE), the Omar
Dengo Foundation (FOD), the Escuela Agronomica Regional del Tropico
Humedo (EARTH), the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED), the
Sistema Nacional de Informacion Cientifica y Tecnologica (SINICIT),
The Universidad Nacional (UNA), the Instituto Nacional de
Biodiversidad (INBIO), the Instituto Centroamericano de Administracion
de Empresas (INCAE), the Fundacion NAHUAL (Proyecto Huracan), the
Earth Council, and the Instituto Interamericano de Ciencias Agricolas
(IICA).

The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) has recently
installed 140 Mbps optical links between major cities in Costa Rica.  A
2 Mbps (multiplexed out of ICE 140 Mbps intra city links) is
administered by Radiografica Costarricense S.A.  This is referred as
the RACSALINK NETWORK, the logical circuit and physical link for the
TCP/IP Internet Costa Rican Backbone.  The 2 Mbps RACSA links (speed
E1) are multiplexed in 30 56/64 Kbps channels.  Central RACSALINK
network nodes are located at ICE/RACSA facilities at San Jose, San
Pedro, Cartago, Alajuela, Heredia, and Limon.

RACSALINK Network is a distributed architecture state of the art
multi-trunk multi-node fiber optics network.  The system is based on
CODEX 6281 network processors, located at central ICE/RACSA nodes.

At the network level, CRNet backbone is based on high performance
CISCO routers (AGS/4 and MGS/4) located at RACSA/ICE nodes to route IP
traffic and to serve as Point-of-Presence (POP) to interconnect
individual institutions.  A project sponsored by the Organization of
American States (OAS) will permit the interconnection of the
Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria in Nicaragua to the CRNet Internet
gateway.  It is expected that this connection will be the starting
point of a Central American internet backbone.  Initially, IP traffic
to Central America will be carried over 9.6 analogical links.

IV. Conclusions

An important networking activity prompted by the recent
interconnection to major worldwide research networks has taken place
in the country.  This activity is now centered in the establishment of
local internet nodes interconnected by a local TCP/IP fiber backbone.

Without access to the world scientific potential, scientists in the
country will remain isolated, frustrated and unproductive.  This
project represents an opportunity to learn and implement scientific
communication tools as well as giving a major impact to the whole
education system and country economy.

Acknowledgements

Funding for the interconnection of Costa Rica to major research
networks comes from a BID-CONICIT grant, the University of Costa Rica,
the IBM Corporation, the Agency for International Development (AID),
and the Organization of American States (OAS).  In addition to the
decisive support from the University of Costa Rica in personnel,
equipment and financial resources, important support has been received
form the Ministry of Science and Technology, the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, the National Science Foundation (NSF), Racsa,
Sprint, Panamsat and cisco Corporation.  Additional support has been
received from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Florida State
University.

References

(1) M. Cerdas, G.F. de Teramond and C. Gutierrez, An International
    Electronic Connection for Central American Scientists, Presented
    at the Space Conference of the Americas, San Jose, March 12-16,
    1990.  Conference Proceedings, Vol. 2 p. 680 (San Jose, 1991).

(2) G.F. de Teramond, C. Gutierrez, E. Mata, R. Oreamuno, L. H.
    Landweber, R.D. Bremel, Establishment of an Internet Backbone
    Within Costa Rica, Proposal to the Agency for International
    Development, San Jose, 1991.

*Director, R&D Unit in Information Technologies and Networks,
Universidad de Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica

================================================
n-2-1-012.05

Ebone provides Megabit IP backbone

At the Ebone consortium meeting on February 3rd in Luxembourg, the
partners finalized the budget, decided on an upgrade of the backbone,
set up the organization to operate Ebone in 1993, and confirmed
Ebone's long term strategy.

21 partners have confirmed their commitment to the budget which covers
a backbone connecting six backbone sites, nine additional access lines
and three links to the US.  Ebone is thus used directly for their
international IP traffic by partners in virtually all Western European
countries and indirectly by several other countries linked to the
Ebone partners.  In addition, Ebone will be used for pilot CLNS
traffic.

At the meeting, a plan to upgrade part of the backbone was decided.
This means 1.5 Mbps from Stockholm to Washington and to Amsterdam, 1.5
Mbps from Amsterdam to Geneva, 1 Mbps from Geneva to the US and 2 Mbps
from Geneva to Paris, and 1.5 Mbps from Paris to Washington.  The US
links are provided in cooperation with NSFnet and other US IP
providers.  In addition, 256 kbps links from London to Paris and to
Stockholm are being considered for upgrade and the inclusion of a
London to Washington link is being investigated.  A new backbone site
in Bonn has been decided and one in Vienna is being investigated.
With this much needed upgrade Ebone can more confidently transport
traffic from the rapidly growing number of IP hosts in the partners'
networks.

Kees Neggers was re-elected as Ebone chairman and an executive
committee consisting of Dennis Jennings, Phil Jones, Christian Michau,
Dave Morton, Kees Neggers, Peter Rastl and Peter Villemoes was
appointed. Funded staff which will assist the executive committee and
operate the network includes Frode Greisen as (part time) general
manager, Bernhard Stockman as (part time) chairman of the Ebone action
team which is planning Ebone development, and Peter Lothberg as Ebone
operations center manager assisted by full time staff at KTH in
Stockholm and part time staff at each of the six Ebone backbone sites.
RARE is providing the secretariat support for the consortium.

The meeting also confirmed Ebone's long term strategy to concentrate
in the future on providing a neutral interconnect for all networks,
while it is assumed that provision of backbone services will be
offered by one or more (competing) providers in the longer run.  Until
such offers are forthcoming, Ebone will take care of its partners'
needs in this area too.

================================================
n-2-1-012.07

EuropaNET

PTT Telecom & COSINE announce the launch of EuropaNET, a pan-European
multi-protocol backbone data network service

The Eureka development project COSINE, funded by the countries of both
the European Community and EFTA, has as its central objective the
provision of a pan-European telecommunications infrastructure for
academic, industrial and governmental researchers.

Following completion of a public invitation to tender by RARE (Reseaux
Associes pour la Recherche Europeenne) on behalf of COSINE, a
multi-million ECU contract has been awarded to PTT Telecom of the
Netherlands to provide a backbone data network and associated services
supporting a range of communications protocols currently used in the
research community.  The three year contract includes performance and
availability guarantees; these in themselves represent a major step
forward in the procurement of international telecommunications
services within Europe.

The network, to be known as EuropaNET, can be accessed directly at
national points of presence within all the COSINE member countries and
already currently offers a range of access speeds up to 2 Mbit/sec.
Independent performance analysis which has just been completed
indicates that the network can efficiently provide for transmission of
both TCP/IP and X.25 packets, the standard communications protocols
currently used in the European research community.  It is expected that
all European national research networks will connect to EuropaNET,
which will also have intercontinental connections to similar networks
worldwide.  EuropaNET has replaced IXI, the backbone network which had
provided X.25 services to the research community across Europe for the
past two years.

Chairman of the COSINE Policy Group and Advisor to the Director of the
Telematics Division of the European Commission's DG XIII, Horst Huenke
said, "EuropaNET offers the European research community the
opportunity to pool their resources into a single backbone network,
thus obtaining significant economies of scale.  The multi-protocol
capabilities of the network should render irrelevant the arguments
about rival technologies which have tended to distract the European
research community from making progress in this field."

In addition to the multi-protocol backbone service offering both X.25
and TCP/IP interfaces, EuropaNET also provides the ability to
interwork between different access protocols and a development path to
a range of future interface standards.  It is based on an extensive
investment by PTT Telecom in lines and infrastructure, with switching
technology being provided by RC Electronics.

In order to encourage national research networks to take advantage of
the high performance 2 Mbit/sec. access, the Commission of the
European Community is making available enabling funding to assist
networks with their subscriptions.  Two networks have already connected
at this speed and a further four, including three interfacing via
TCP/IP, are expected to connect at this speed in the next few months.

Access to EuropaNET is being extended to Eastern Europe by a separate
contract between the European Commission and PTT Telecom as part of
the Commission's support programme for Eastern Europe.  As a result,
researchers in Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics,
Bulgaria and Romania will be able to communicate with researchers
world-wide using EuropaNET.  It is expected that the Eastern European
countries will be connected to EuropaNET during the course of this
year.

Unisource Business Networks has taken over the operation of the
network from PTT Telecom and will continue its management from their
International Network Management Center in The Hague.  Unisource also
sees it as a major asset and opportunity to position and use this
network for other advanced European Network requirements and projects
in other areas where the EC has a vested interest.  How and when the
services will be integrated into the Unisource Business Networks
service portfolio will be decided during this year.

================================================
n-2-1-012.42

Evolution of the GARR network
by Stefano Trumpy*
<[e-mail]>

GARR  is  the  acronym  for Harmonisation  Group  for Research  Networks
created in 1988 operating  under  the Ministry of the University  and of
Scientific and Technological Research (MURST) in Italy. GARR is also the
name of the Italian Research Network which is currently conducted by the
founder organisations:  three public  research nation-wide  Institutions
i.e.  CNR  (National Council for Research),  ENEA  (National Council for
Research on Nuclear  and Alternative Energies Sources),  INFN  (National
High Energy Physics Institute) and by three consortia offering computing
resources   to   Italian   universities,   i.e.   CINECA,   CILEA,   and
Tecnopolis-CSATA.

The aim  of GARR is to establish and operate  a backbone interconnecting
the  Italian  research   and   academic  networks  and  to   co-ordinate
connections to international networks.

All computers on GARR  will  use  Internet-style domain  addresses.  The
top-level domain is  .IT  (Italy) and the user Internet addresses are in
the form [e-mail].

GARR  will  continue  to  maintain  connections  to  the  major research
networks,  including EASInet,  Internet,  BITNET/EARN,  EUnet,  Fidonet,
HEPnet,  Europa  Net,  EBONE  and  other  networking  initiatives.   The
participation  of Italy to  the COSINE project was  co-ordinated by GARR
and  particular attention is  given to  the follow on activities of  the
project i.e. the operational Unit and the Europa-net infrastructure.

The  backbone of  the network  provides four TDM  channels over  2  Mbps
lines, carrying IP, DECnet, SNA and X.25 traffic.

 The backbone was initially built up by the original seven primary sites
located  in  Milano  (CILEA),   Bologna  (CINECA  and  CNAF-INFN),  Pisa
(CNUCE-CNR),  Roma  (ENEA and NIC- INFN) and Bari (CSATA).  Subsequently
MURST funded a project to connect the over fifty universities in Italy ;
the major ones to  be connected as extensions of the backbone  (2 Mbps),
while the others to be attached  with 64kbps lines to the primary sites.
Also GARR is adopting  a  new public  service providing bridging betweek
ethernet LANs at 2Mbps (CLAN). The present configuration of the backbone
is shown in the following picture.

The planned extension under grant of MURST is the following.

The GARR network  has been constituted  to serve primarily the following
users of all institution reporting to MURST:

-Universities
-Consortia offering computer services to universities (CILEA, CINECA, etc.)
-Astronomic and Astrophysics Observatories e Vesuviani
-National Research Council (CNR)
-National High Energy Physics Institute (INFN)
-Italian Space Agency (ASI) and
-other  public  funded research  institutions  like  ENEA  (National
Council for  Research on  Nuclear and Alternative Energies Sources)  and
the Consortium Tecnopolis CSATA etc.

The  network  services  are also accessible by  research  departments of
private initiatives which have  cooperations and  common  projects  with
public funded research environment.

The utilisation of the network is  allowed  for the activities connected
to  the development  of research  programs,  higher  education,  to  the
diffusion of scientific information and to the support and management of
the  research programs.  The  utilisation of  the  GARR  network is  not
allowed for
-       commercial activities;
-       exchange of information not pertinent to the scientific research or
 higher education;
-not permitted access  to the  facilities connected to the network for a
 usage  that provokes waste  of resources,  infringement to the privacy,
 etc.

The GARR Network Information Service  (GARR-NIS) is located at CNUCE-CNR
in  Pisa,  which currently provides it with all the necessary resources:
hardware, software, financing, personnel, etc.
The GARR-NIS is running the IT top-level domain name server and the c=IT
X.500 DSA.

GARR NIS is the reference-point for various registration procedures (for
organisations,  networks,  domains, persons, etc.) required to access to
the GARR network and to international networks.  GARR NIS main functions
are:

to  be the reference-point  for  various registration procedures  (for
 organisations,  networks, domains, persons, etc.) required to access to
 the GARR network and to international networks.

to define procedures and registration  templates,  taking into account
 the  information   requested  by  other  European  and  American  NISes
 (GSI-NIC,  NNSC,  RIPE-NCC,  EASI- NIS, etc.  ), in accordance with the
 Guidelines established by GARR and collaborating with the international
 networks managers.

to acquire network information and  to mantain databases and directory
 services in order to make such information accessible via the network.

to  provide  the Internet DNS and X.500  DSA services  at the national
 root  level,  and to coordinate their  distributed  management  at  the
 national level.

to  publicise,   duplicate  or  improve  the  accessibility   (through
 directory  and/or  information  discovery  systems)  to useful  network
 information provided by other NISes or information-servers.

to carry out promotional activities spreading information on the  GARR
 network and NIS:  periodic reports, announcements, news about workshops
 and seminars, etc.

GARR-NIS  is  reachable  at  the  following  address:  via  Internet  at
[e-mail] and via  X.400 at c=it;  admd=garr;  prmd=garr;  o=nis;
s=info

[I am sending via fax to ISOC a copy including two pictures]

*CNUCE - ISTITUTO DEL CNR
PISA

================================================
n-2-1-012.55

New Developments in Hungarnet
by Istvan Tetenyi,
<[e-mail]>


E-mail in Hungary

The coverage with e-mail of Hungarian users has significantly improved
in the last couple of months.  Today, e-mail is the most popular
service which is provided for the R&D community.  Users are e-mail
"aware" as the first nation wide service called ELLA was introduced as
early as 1988.

This rapid growth was foreseen and therefore the technical committee of
Information Infrastructure Programme devised a technical guideline in
late 1991, on how to improve the service.

The dilemma between choosing only one mail protocol and the diversity
of options was very serious.  Mail protocols like SMTP, BSMTP,
Mail-11, UUCP and the home grown ELLA protocol were all in use.  The
transport protocols were also very rich: X.25, TCP/IP, NJE, DECNET and
matters like RFC 822 addressing had to be introduced.

The solution finally chosen was based on the brilliant package of M.
Maddison, the MX mail exchanger for VMS.  It allowed to integrate
fully the ELLA protocol with all the other mail systems.  One very
significant feature was the full support of SMTP over X.25.  The MX
package had all those features which provided a sound basis for growth
without protocolar constrains.  System administrators found it easy to
manage MX and sites with VMS generally opted for it and this will be the
general solution for the coming years.

The HBONE project

The aim of this project is to establish a TCP/IP backbone for the
Hungarian research and education community.  The primary role of HBONE
is to provide a private data network for TCP/IP networking.

To interconnect the backbone routers initially, 64kbit/sec speed leased
lines will be used.  The X.25 service of the PTT will also be used in
some cases as primary and in general as backup solution.  It is
expected that by mid 1993 a star shaped network with six leaves around
Budapest could be finalised.

Router suppliers were asked for proposals in 1992, and not surprisingly,
cisco was given the option to provide the first ten routers for the
R&D community.

HBONE will be connected to the FDDI backbone of three university
campuses in Budapest and also the FDDI ring in the largest county city,
Debrecen.

International connectivity is provided by two 64 kbit/s leased links
to EBONE via neighbouring Austria.  The European Multiprotocol
Backbone (Europenet) provides another 64kbit/s X.25 link which will be
used also for IP traffic.

The network management of the HBONE is undecided as yet.  Initially, a
cooperative management was adopted until the number of routers are
below a given limit.  Last year, a Charta of acceptable usage policy
was developed and accepted by backbone managers and end users.

There are concerns about the available bandwidth.  The number of
active users in university campuses has grown with the completion of
LAN/MAN-s.  Sites with 1000 users are not rare anymore.  The bandwidth
per capita (a quantitative measure similar to GNP per capita) is very
low in Hungary, therefore the preparations for introducing higher
speed on HBONE links have been started, on some of the national links
2Mbps and on international links 128 kbps will be introduced in the
next year.

Great emphasis is on client/server type applications.  The usage of
batch oriented services like NJE is preferred.  This is the reason why
we are expecting the need for rapidly growing speeds.

Sites without real TCP/IP connectivity are also cared for.  Mail
service, gopher searches, and News reading are publicly available for
users with simple X.29 access.

================================================
n-2-1-012.56

Romania
by Stephen Ruth*
[e-mail]

In less than two months, six major nodes have begun BITNET/
EARN transmissions.   The
Institute for Atomic Physics in Bucharest (ROIFA), led by
Dr. Ghorghi Pascovici, has already registered five hundred
users, aiming for a thousand, and is in contact with
countries all over the world, aided by a grant from the
Mellon Foundation.  Currently they are the busiest node but
the country's largest university, Politechnic Institute,
(ROIPB) will soon be connecting several thousand users,
according to Dr. Paul Christea and Dr. Nino Popovici, who
are leading the effort there.  Part of a
Mellon grant is funding a group of highly skilled graduate
students at IPB who call themselves the BEST team.    They
are doing some of the training and working with their
professors to become skilled networkers.

Current nodes include:

  ROEARN, routing-only destination, in Bucharest has about
   one hundred users;  Eugen Staicut : ESTAICUT@ROEARN, and
   George Macri  : GMACRI@ROEARN.

  ROIFA  (Institute for Atomic Physics)  growing to over
   one thousand users;  Serban Constantinescu SERBAN@ROIFA

  ROIPB (Politechnic Institute) up and running now at full
   capacity due to the recent COCOM approval,  with a total
   potential of thousands of users;

  ROBCU (Central Univ. Library) recently connected,
   mainly a D.B. server, but with about a hundred users
   already

  ROUTT (Technical University of Timisoara) with a large
   potential but only a few terminals

  ROIMAR (Institute of Mathematics) with potential of
   connecting the Romanian Academy of Science to a powerful
   DEC-based system  George Gussi,director of IMAR
   [e-mail] or [e-mail]
   The Academy : [e-mail]


A ring of FIDONET stations
was established around Bucharest in November , enabling
dozens of new nodes to be established in a matter of weeks.
The FIDO stations, first in Romania, have complimented the
more robust network connections. FidoMaven Bob Barad's
outstanding skills in the setup made this a reality.

Romania is gradually building up its infrastructure in
terms of people and equipment as part of a long term plan.
Romanians are also connecting in record
numbers to the Internet and EARN because they realize that
every new user helps to develop a greater opportunity to
spread the benefits of networking.  They are also
investing in spreading network benefits, even
barely realized ones, to Brazov, Iasi, Timosoara and other
cities outside of Bucharest.   They are poised for major
progress but will need a lot of energy and sharing of
resources internally and more help from the private-sector,
governments, technology associations and interested Internet Society
members every step of the way.

      A test of the country's resolve will be the degree to
which humanists, liberal arts specialties and other
disciplines that are often the last to be allowed to use
network services are empowered to participate.   Dr.  Mahi
Dragonescu, the president of the Romanian Academy of
Sciences recently said that the Romanian
plan is to have at least one humanist connected to the
network for each engineer.   If this trajectory is achieved
Romania's explosive entry into networking will be sustained
and the country will become a model for eastern Europe and
beyond.

* Professor, George Mason University

================================================
n-2-1-012.70.3
Russia (GlasNet)
 by Anatoly Voronov
<[e-mail]>


GlasNet, the Russian network for democratic communications, is about
to reach the one thousand users threshold in a couple of months.

The Russian economic situation, with hyperinflation and lack of
political stability, forces us to be extremely inventive and astute in
order to make ends meet.  Yet, positive changes are taking place.

A new packet switching service, Infotel, has been settled in Moscow,
offering enhanced facilities of access.  Actually, an intercity call
is almost the only way of access GlasNet host from other cities.
Starting April, it will be possible to access GlasNet by local PADs in
Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don.  A PAD in St. Petersburg is
up and running.  The service is being planned to expand to Novgorod,
Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Voronezh, Vladivostok.

GlasNet, with its reasonable rates and policy which encourages private
persons to use telecommunications, attracts the interest of academic
and research workers, offering them an opportunity of direct and
independent connection with their colleagues in the USA and other
Western countries.  GlasNet's heavy users are Protein Research
Institute in Puschino (Moscow region), Lebedev Institute of Physics
(Moscow), Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry (Moscow).

The traditional bottleneck is the bandwidth to the West.  The dialup
connection to the IGC (Institute for Global Communications) host in
San Francisco, California, is growing more and more expensive.  In
January, rates for international calls increased four times.

In this context, GlasNet is looking forward to get an access to a new
64 kbit/s channel granted by the Soros Foundation, to foster better
information facilities for Russian academic workers.

The appeal for used modems and other hardware, placed in the previous
ISOC News issue, has worked: David Lisbona sent us from Israel a modem
and a laptop, to give them "second birth" in Russia.


Note to Tony, Steve G. handed this "submission" to me at the
NORDUnet conference while we were in Helsinki.  He said he
didn't know where you wanted to put this in the News, but trusts us to
place it appropriately.

================================================
n-2-1-012.70.4

Soros Generosity Assists Russian Connectivity
by Steve Goldstein
<[e-mail]>


In December 1992, George Soros, the Hungarian-born U.S. financier and
philanthropist, announced the formation of the International Science
Foundation (ISF) for the Former Soviet Union (FSU), and his intent to
donate US $100 million over two years through the ISF to help
stabilize the practice of science and relaxed scholarly activity in
the countries which have emerged from the FSU.

In a series of meetings among advisors to the ISF, a strong consensus
and clear message emerged: "Internet connectivity is vital to the
well-being of scientists in the FSU".  Mr. Soros received the message
favorably, and now telecommunications is an integral activity of the
ISF program.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) assists the ISF by providing
advice and access to selected NSF networking infrastructure support
activities.  The immediate focus will be assisting ISF's work with the
Russian science community to implement one or more 64kbps external
(international) links.  Similar activities with other FSU countries is
also being pursued.  The next steps will be to help with the
improvement of in-country connectivity in the FSU countries.  Also,
ISF will consider supporting activities to train service providers to
provide assistance to end users and to help prospective end-users gain
access and learn how to use the networks.  In all instances, ISF will
seek cooperation with existing service providers and work with other
international assistance activities (e.g., NORDUnet, German, and
Polish initiatives).  Collectively, we look forward to reducing the
isolation of our colleagues in the FSU through the facilities of the
Internet.




================================================
n-2-1-013.30

Israel
by Hank Nussbacher
<[e-mail]>

Israel has upgraded its internal ILAN backbone to 128kb/sec leased
lines.  In addition, it has also upgraded its link to PSI in the USA
to 128kb/sec (satellite connection), giving Israel a total of 192kb
international capacity (the other 64kb is to Europe).

================================================
n-2-1-013.95

Iranian Mullahs on the Internet?

According to a recent press release from Iran's
news agency, INRNA, three thousand Iranian mullahs have been
trained to use computers for research in Islamic sciences.
The director of a centre introducing computers to
theological schools in Iran's main centre of Shi'ite moslem learning
of Qom said it planned to link up with international
computer-based information networks.
The mainstream of Shi'ite moslem clergy has generally resisted
technological innovations over centuries, but Iran's Islamic leaders
say this should change.


================================================
n-2-1-014.10.2

Some Thoughts on Computer Networking in sub-Saharan Africa
by Paul Nash*
<[e-mail]>


Introduction

Africa might need peace and stability, but it also needs e-mail.
While the telecommunications infrastructure is poor, there is an
ever-growing need to communicate.  More and more non-government
organisations (NGOs) are sending workers, often with existing computer
skills, into the field to assist with health-care, developing
infrastructures, etc.  These workers need to communicate with each
other and with the various aid agencies funding them.

Telephone lines are often few and far between, and line quality
shocking.  Fax transmissions seldom come through, and time-zone
differences can make voice communication difficult.  However,
electronic mail makes good use of limited bandwidth, and the various
transfer protocols allow for error detection and/or correction and
restarting transmission.  Store-and-forward facilities allow a number
of shorter, more reliable local hops, leaving the intercontinental
links to those with more reliable telecommunications.

Due to the poor quality of phone lines, only one brand of modem is of
any use in most of this continent: the Telebit Trailblazer and
derivatives.  While I hate to endorse any vendor's products, PEP beats
the various CCITT modulation schemes hands down, providing up to
400cps over lines that will not support V.22bis.

UUCP/UUPC

The easiest way to transport Internet-format mail over erratic dial-up
links is to use UUCP in its various flavours.  Among its advantages
are its ubiquity, with versions available for most Unix platforms,
MS-DOS, Apple Mac and many other platforms.  The protocol, however,
shows its age.  Even with Telebit's UUCP spoofing, throughput is not
as high as it could be, and failed transfers are not restartable.

Nonetheless, a simple laptop computer running MS-DOS can use a
combination of Pegasus Mail and UUPC to provide a simple,
cost-effective mail system.

Fidonet

Fidonet, the hobbyist network, uses an addressing scheme far removed
from Internet standards.  However, it normally uses Z-modem as the
transport, and so gains in throughput what it loses in
interoperability.  For this reason, Fidonet technology networks have
made great inroads into the African e-mail arena, and have become the
de facto standard of most NGOs.

Gateways between Internet mail and Fidonet can be complex, especially
when they are to be kept as transparent as possible.  I use RFMAIL
under Unix to gate between the two networks, with a multiplicity of
kluges to convert Fidonet addresses to Internet (and vice versa).  My
personal opinion is that the gains at the transport layer are
seriously outweighed by the incompatibilities at application level.

Current connections

There are an ever-growing number of links into Africa.  While I cannot
describe all of them (and probably am not aware of half of them), I
can provide an idea of the current status.

Probably the most heavily used is the Greennet/Worknet network, which
starts with Greennet in the UK, and uses Fidonet protocols to reach
down through Africa, ending at Worknet in South Africa.  From Worknet,
traffic passes through the RFMAIL gateway to reach the South African
universities' network (Uninet) and the rest of the world.

Uninet also has a Fidonet gateway, which provides connections to the
University of Zambia, as well as dial-up UUCP links to the
Universities of Mozambique (Maputo), Namibia and Zimbabwe.

There are also UUCP dial-up links between my Unix machine and
Mozambique (Nampula), Zambia and Zimbabwe.  These use Distnet, a PC
package developed by SKAN Communications in Canada, and U-Access, a
Macintosh package.  There are further links on the cards to Angola
(once the peace dies down) and places further afield.

Experiences

The experience so far has been extremely heartening.  E-mail has
proved a great success, and the demand seems to be growing.  However,
the telephone lines prove a greater and greater problem.  Recently,
the Zimbabwean PTT changed its international telephone exchange, and
the University found that only two out of over two thousand attempted
calls to South Africa succeeded.

The link from northern Zambia to South Africa succeeds about one in
four, with throughputs of around 100 cps (from modems that should
provide 18000).  In addition, although South Africa has reasonably good
communications, the PTT here is opposed to "third-party" traffic, and
tries to prevent such cooperative ventures.

Although this may seem less than perfect, the current situation is a
great advance on anything that went before.  There is, however, room
for a vast number of improvements.

Future developments

The field is ripe for alternative transport mechanisms, which can
avoid the current shortage of telephone cables.  Two that spring to
mind are satellite and radio, and both should have a place in network
plans.

Satellite links can be most economically provided with
micro-satellites, which act as flying mailboxes, while whizzing by in
low orbit.  The earth-station requirements for these machines can be
met for as little as $5000.  Due to their design, mail must be sent on
a store-and-forward basis.

There is at least one geostationary satellite over Africa, with
bandwidth to spare.  One of the ex-USSR military satellites now has
bandwidth for sale, for those who can afford the $750000 C-band earth
station and space-segment costs.

Lastly, humble HF or VHF radios should not be ignored.  These are
cheap to provide, and while providing a comparatively low bandwidth,
can provide real-time delivery.

Conclusion

To be competitive, UUCP needs a more efficient transport mechanism,
such as Z-modem or Ian Lance Taylor's UUCP-i, to be used to deliver
e-mail to non-Unix computers, and close the gap with Fidonet
technology.  A simple user interface, such as Pegasus Mail, allows
neophyte users to operate a system with minimal training.  Finally,
consideration should be given to communications media that are not
dependent on copper wires, as these are in short supply.


*Communications Software Developer, Free Range Computer Systems

================================================
n-2-1-015.28

630 msec to McMurdo

February is an active time in Antarctica.  Lots of needed work is
done before the bad weather sets in.  Recently, an Internaut received
an e-mail message from a technician at the satellite tracking station in
McMurdo, Antarctica, who noted that they recently gained access to the
INTERNET.  Whereupon he proceeded to traceroute to mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov

 traceroute to mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov (157.132.103.50), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
  1  dellrouter.dell.com (143.166.224.2)  30 ms  10 ms  10 ms
  2  UT6-S6.sesqui.net (128.241.4.161)  20 ms  10 ms  0 ms
  3  UT1-E2.sesqui.net (128.241.0.241)  20 ms  10 ms  20 ms
  4  RICE2-S5.sesqui.net (128.241.3.129)  50 ms  20 ms  20 ms
  5  ENSS.sesqui.net (128.241.0.94)  30 ms  20 ms  10 ms
  6  t3-1.Houston-cnss65.t3.ans.net (140.222.65.2)  20 ms  10 ms  20 ms
  7  t3-3.Houston-cnss64.t3.ans.net (140.222.64.4)  20 ms  20 ms  20 ms
  8  t3-2.Los-Angeles-cnss16.t3.ans.net (140.222.16.3)  40 ms  50 ms  50 ms
  9  t3-2.San-Francisco-cnss8.t3.ans.net (140.222.8.3)  50 ms  70 ms  60 ms
 10  t3-0.San-Francisco-cnss9.t3.ans.net (140.222.9.1)  70 ms  80 ms  70 ms
 11  t3-0.enss144.t3.ans.net (140.222.144.1)  130 ms  60 ms  100 ms
 12  ARC1.NSN.NASA.GOV (192.52.195.2)  80 ms  110 ms  140 ms
 13  * ARC5.NSN.NASA.GOV (192.100.12.5)  60 ms  70 ms
 14  128.161.115.2 (128.161.115.2)  660 ms  640 ms  620 ms
 15  157.132.100.15 (157.132.100.15)  640 ms  640 ms  630 ms
 16  mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov (157.132.103.50)  650 ms  630 ms  650 ms

Indeed McMurdo is connected!

[Please conserve their bandwidth and don't do this yourself.]

================================================
n-2-1-020.17

Medical Informatics

The State University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil is noted for
Internet activism.  It hosts the worldwide biodiversity efforts.  It also hosts
a global initiative for medical informatics.  Dr. Renato M.E. Sabbatini operates
the Center for Biomedical Informatics from the University and publishes the
Electronic Newsletter on Medical Informatics

As part of the Center's activities, it maintains an on-line catalog of
public-domain medical
software for IBM-PC compatibles.  It offers two kinds of software:

   Free-copy public-domain software, which was acquired from other
   sources. It can be download by anonymous FTP from the host
  <CCSUN.UNICAMP.BR> (143.106.1.5)

  Shareware medical software. This software is protected by copyright
   and thus has a small price tag attached to it. It was developed
   by the staff of the Center for Biomedical Informatics of the
   State University of Campinas. The only way to acquire it is
   by sending a check in US dollars of UNESCO coupons to the
   address below.  The diskettes are sent by airmail.


In addition to the software, medical personal around the world can subscribe
to Dr. Sabbatini's newsletter by sending a one-line message containing:

SUBSCRIBE NIBNEWS Your Name
to [e-mail]

The shareware includes advanced tools in multiple languages, including:

A shell program for generic building of rule-based
expert systems in Medicine.  The program is used in
Medical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence courses at under-
graduate and graduate levels in the institution.

An educational program for teaching medical
image processing techniques.

A powerful, but simple to use, bibliographical
reference manager. References are entered by means of a common word
processor, and fields are tagged as in MEDLARS.

A simple problem-oriented medical record package.

An educational program for teaching digital ECG processing techniques.

A neural network emulator for research and educational purposes.

An educational software package for Windows 3.1, developed using Visual BASIC
several common physiological simulations

Dr. Sabatini can be reached at: [e-mail] or [e-mail]
NET


================================================
n-2-1-020.20

Experimenting with Library of Congress Classification in GopherSpace
by Billy Barron*
<[e-mail]>

In my last column, I discussed the CICNet Electronic Journal Project.
Recently, we have been conducting an experiment into the use of
Library of Congress Classification for categorizing electronic
journals in our Gopher server.

Why Library of Congress Classification (LCC)?  We picked LCC because
the majority of the CIC libraries use it.  Over the past few months, I
have been involved in numerous discussions about the taxonomy of
subject-oriented Gophers.  The conclusion I have drawn is that there
are numerous ways to classify materials and all have their relative
merits.  With some people though, the choice seems to be a religious
issue.

One of the problems with LCC is that some related topics are widely
separated from each other.  This is natural in any classification
scheme that places an item in one place, which is necessary for
physical holdings.  To work around this problem, we have decided to
add Gopher links to tie together related topics.  For example, in LCC,
Computer Science is in QA75 and QA76 and Computer Networks are in
TK5105.5 to TK5105.9.  In the CICNet Gopher, I plan on putting an
entry under QA75-76 pointing at TK5105.5-9 to make finding the
information easier.

Another important aspect of this project is the building of a catalog
and a searchable index to all the journals.  I have yet to work on
this aspect of the project, but it should prove to be interesting.

I should stress that the use of LCC is just as a demonstration and
that I am not a cataloguer.  Therefore, I realize that some items are
classified incorrectly.  If you look through the collection
(gopher.cic.net) and can correctly recatalog some of the items, drop
me a note ([e-mail]) and I will correct it.  Anyway, it should be
an interesting experiment.


*VAX/Unix Systems Manager, University of North Texas

================================================
n-2-1-020.23

Network News from the American Mathematical Society--AMS
by William B. Woolf *
 <[e-mail]>
and David L. Rodgers**
<[e-mail]>

e-MATH--Services for Mathematicians

The American Mathematical Society (with funding from the National Science
Foundation--NSF) provides a number of services to the mathematical
community through its e-MATH.  Access is currently available to anyone
with VT100 terminal emulation on Internet, by typing "telnet
e-math.ams.org" or "telnet 130.44.1.100"; both the login name and the
password are currently "e-math" (lower case).  Among the services
provided are:

     o  the Combined Membership List of the American Mathematical
        Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society
        for Industrial and Applied Mathematics;

     o  a library of public-domain software related to TeX, AMS-TeX, and
        AMS-Fonts;

     o  an employment information service, including all job listings
        which appear in the AMS publication "Employment Information in
        the Mathematical Sciences", plus the capability that job-hunters
        may post a brief curriculum vita which will be distributed to the
        employers with job listings;

     o  access via Gopher to a number of other services on the Internet,
        including preprint and directory services;

     o  listings of future AMS meetings;

     o  access to an author-lookup service based on the files of
        Mathematical Reviews;

     o  an electronic version of the Mathematics Classification Scheme;

     o  an electronic version of The Bulletin of the American
        Mathematical Society;

     o  a WAIS database containing items from the AMS Catalogue.

AMS developing e-journal platform

Work is under way at the AMS (with NSF support anticipated) on the
development of a software platform to support the creation and
distribution of electronic journals with advanced features including
support of cooperative authoring, utilizing version-control and
annotation capabilities.

SGML and Mathematics--A DTD for mathematics fragments

A subcommittee of the American Association of Publishers (AAP) convened
by W. B. Woolf (AMS) is at work on the development of a DTD (Document
Type Definition) for mathematics within SGML (Standard Generalized Markup
Language).  It is hoped to find a DTD which synthesizes the best features
of an existing draft standard from AAP and an existing International
Standards Organization standard (ISO 9573 TR 1988-1).  A series of
meetings including representatives of Euromath, Elsevier, ISO, CERN,
Springer-Verlag, AMS, etc., has culminated in the creation of a small
technical working committee which hopes to have a revised draft available
for broad distribution late this winter.  People interested in the
technical issues involved can subscribe to the discussion list SGML-MATH
by sending the message "subscribe sgml-math your_name" to
"[e-mail]".

*Associate Executive Director, AMS
**Manager, System Development, Mathematical Reviews
================================================
n-2-1-030.50.2

Gigabit Networks
by Craig Partridge,
<[e-mail]>

This column is about the different types of media that we can use to
transmit data at gigabits per second.

The first type of media is optical fiber.  Briefly, an optical fiber
is a strand of glass about the size of a human hair.  The glass is
specially treated so that at certain frequencies of light, light
travels through the glass with very little loss.  As a result it is
possible (at least in theory) to send signals hundreds or even
thousands of kilometers through a single piece fiber.  (I should
quickly note that these wonderful properties are a characteristic of
single mode fiber.  There's another type of fiber, called multimode
fiber, which is easier to install and terminate, but has less good
propogation properties).

The bandwidth of a fiber is limited by the number of frequencies of
light that we can transmit through it.  Currently technology allows us
to send about 75 TeraHertz (THz) through a single fiber, and we can
signal between 1 and 1.4 bits per Hz, so a single fiber has a
theoretical bandwidth of over 100 terabits per second.

How are we going to actually send data at those bit rates?

One way is to try to make the fiber into a wire with a big bandwidth.
That's the approach used by Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), a
telephony protocol for signalling over fiber.  (SONET is part of a
larger suite of CCITT standards known as the Synchronous Digital
Hierarchy or SDH).  In brief, SONET is a scaleable protocol that sends
frames of data over the fiber.  A SONET frame is made up of a number
of repeated 90*9 chunks of bytes.  To scale SONET up to higher speeds,
one simply sends more chunks in each frame, while keeping the frame
rate constant.  At the lowest SONET speed of 51.8 Mb/s (called Optical
Carrier or OC-1), the SONET frame is one 90*9 chunk.  At OC-3 (155
Mb/s), the SONET frame is three 90*9 chunks; at OC-12 (622 Mb/s) the
frame is twelve chunks, and so on.

One problem with treating the fiber as a big wire is that developing
fiber optic components that can signal at very high data rates is
difficult to do.  Currently, it is not possible to find components
that signal at rates faster than OC-48 (2.4 Gb/s), which is a very
small use of a 100 terabit per second fiber (OC-2,000,000 anyone?).

One way to solve the challenge of combining slow optical components
and large fiber bandwidths is to divide up the fiber frequencies into
different channels, and have different components transmit at
different wavelengths.  This practice is known as Wave Division
Multiplexing, or WDM.  It is a sort of radio-in-fiber approach, where
if your host and my host wish to communicate, we have to tune our
hosts to the same channel.

The key challenges in WDM are first, trying to pack the frequencies as
close together as possible without having signals at one frequency
interfere with signals at another frequency (a practice known as dense
WDM), and second figuring out how to make sure that your host and my
host can correctly (and quickly) find the right channel to tune to.
IBM has demonstrated a WDM network called RAINBOW that supports
several 300 Mb/s channels, and its designers hope to expand the
RAINBOW design to support up to 1,000 channels, each capable of 1
gigabit per second.

But what if you don't have access to fiber between two points?  Can
you still get gigabit performance?  Indeed you can.

If there's line of sight between the two points, then you can use a
radio link.  The Luckynet testbed at AT&T Bell Labs has an
experimental 2.4 Gb/s (OC-48) radio link that covers a 23 mile
distance between two labs.

If you don't have line of sight, then perhaps satellites will come to
the rescue.  NASA is launching the Advanced Communications Technology
Satellite (ACTS) in June.  ACTS can connect multiple sites in the
continental US at 622 Mb/s (OC-12) rates.  Experiments with ACTS over
the next two years will test how to effectively use satellite
communications links at very high data rates.

To learn more about fiber optic networking, consult Paul Green's new
book, Fiber Optic Networks (Prentice Hall, ISBN 013-319492-2).
Biswanath Mukherjee wrote a wonderful two part survey on the design of
WDM networks in the May and July '92 issues of IEEE Network Magazine.
The Luckynet radio link is described in a paper at the 1991 Globecom
Conference.

================================================
n-2-1-030.65

U.S. President Holds Town Meeting on the Internet

During a recent visit of
President Clinton and V.P. Gore at Silicon Graphics
the proceedings - incuding the President's announcement of his new
National Information Infrastructure initiative - were distributed live over
the MBone Internet as an audio-video multicast.
Clinton's speech was followed by a Presidential  "town meeting".


================================================
n-2-1-030.66
Internet Talk Radio
by Carl Malamud
<[e-mail]>

On March 31, I'm launching a new service on the Internet called Internet
Talk Radio.  Internet Talk Radio is a "radio" metaphor: professionally
produced radio programs that show up on the net as audio files.  You
can multicast them, or you can simply FTP the files and play.  All I'm
doing is producing the information and you are free to distribute at
will using the protocol of your choice and to change the encoding format
of the data to suit your computing platform.

Distribution starts from UUNET and fans out to regional networks in an
attempt to try and avoid excessive duplicate transfers.  If you're a local
net, you should contact your service provider.  If you're a service provider,
send mail to [e-mail] and I'll send you back instructions.  If you're
in Europe, mcsun at EUnet will be the initial spool point.  If you're in
Japan, WIDE and IIJ will do distribution.  If you're a Alternet customer,
you'll simply anonymous FTP from UUNET.  We are not using the MBONE, although
the networks that constitute the MBONE is certainly welcome to use that
distribution medium if they feel that it is appropriate.

The first show is "Geek of the Week" (;-), an interview show with members
of the community.  The program will be around a half-hour (e.g., 15 Mbytes
in standard PCM, 8000 sample, 8 bit, mu-law encoding).  The program is
sponsored by Sun Microsystems and O'Reilly & Associates.  Before the ugly
spectre of AUP violations flames up .... we use a National Public Radio-style
ack scheme consisting of just a couple of sentences.  Indications from at
least two of the large government networks are that we are compliant with
their Appropriate Use Policies.

--ed. A more lengthy description of Internet Talk Radio can be found in
the February issue of ConneXions magazine.

================================================
n-2-1-030.80

International Character Sets in the Generic Network Services
by Borka Jerman-Blazic
<[e-mail]>

The support of the International Character Sets in the forthcoming IT
systems used through the network services is probably one of the most
crucial requirements expressed by European users on many international
forums.  In that context, RARE decided to contribute to the area by
acting as a focus for user-requirements in the emerging Character Set
Technology and ensuring ways and methods these requirements to be met
in the relevant standard documents and IT applications.  The
activities are carried out within the RARE Working Group on Character
Sets Technology and the COSINE project.

The group produced several papers about the problems and issues
related to the use of International Character Sets in the network
services.

The group decided the problems of Character Sets should be worked out
within two working levels (i.e., definition of the Character Sets
Repertoires for RARE users and its application in the network
services).  Two services were identified as most important and
relevant to the problem of Character Sets issues: MHS/X.400 and
Directory/X.500.  A document/report was produced which offers solutions
to the use of International Character Sets in the Message Handling
Systems.  The document is in phase of being published as a RTR (RARE
Technical Report) and is referenced in many international events in
the field as an IETF Internet-Draft.  Another document was also
produced which defines the mapping between the Multipurpose Internet
Mail Exchange protocol to MHS/X.400 providing solutions for gatewaying
Internet mail containing message bodies coded with International Coded
Character Sets standards to X.400 systems.

The problem of the Directory and the support of International
Character Sets is quite complex, and for that reason it was decided
within the group that this subject is to be addressed in several
steps.  The major identified items which are planned to be worked
on within the Task Force groups of the RARE Working Group on Character
Sets set up recently within the new RARE Technical Program are the
following:

        Definition of the Repertoire (mainly based on the CCITT T.61
        recommendation and subrepertoires of ISO 10 646 to be derived
        from ISO 646 in collaboration with CEN TC 304).

        Definition of transliteration and conversion rules/tools for
        the Character Set Code Tables used by the majority of users in
        RARE community (i.e., ISO 646 compatible, ISO 8859 family,
        8-bit EBCDIC family, 8-bit IBM PC code pages, 8-bit Macintosh,
        Hewlett-Packard ROMANS8, etc.).

        Promotion of DUAs and DSA of PARADISE, with the defined tables
        and developed conversion tools.

The group is planning in the future to work on the
Internationalization problems within networking by introducing pilots
or Task Forces for special issues, in particular the following items
are planned to be worked out:

        Character Set Technology, i.e., identification, coding methods,
        transformation/ conversion, correspondence between characters
        and glyphs, visual presentations at the device/user
        interfaces, and registrations via the Internet Assigned
        Numbers Authority (IANA).

        Promotion/piloting with the new Document Processing and
        Interchange Technology with support and use of different
        character sets repertoires and fonts, i.e., SGML, ODA, ODE,
        EDI/EDIFACT, and DSSSL.

        Evaluation of standards under development and providing input
        regarding user requirements.


================================================
n-2-1-040.31.1

Resource Discovery and Privacy
by Mike Schwartz*
<[e-mail]>

As resource discovery and information services proliferate on the
Internet, a number of privacy issues arise.  The most obvious examples
concern directories of people.  What rights should people have to
control what information about themselves is visible, who can access
this information, and how the information is updated?

Privacy problems arise in other types of directories as well.  For
example, from time to time users of the archie FTP directory service
discover information that was intended only
for limited distribution.  Typically, this happens when a user looking
for a particular program or document happens across other information
while browsing the FTP site where the needed information was located.
This happened, for example, with an early draft of a document being
created by a networking organization last year.

Another privacy problem arises in conjunction with the provision of
directory service: access logs (which are routinely collected by many
Internet services) can be used to determine peoples' interests,
relationships, and other sensitive information.  For example, logs of
an individual's use of archie or Gopher could indicate interests in
particular personal discussions.  While it has always been possible to
collect such information from older, non-directory oriented services
(such as USENET news servers), the current generation of directory
services can collect information about a much larger, more widely
distributed collection of network users.  It is typical for such
services to receive requests from thousands of users around the world
every day.

In some cases, an explicit directory is not even needed to violate
privacy.  For example, it is possible to determine shared interest
relationships between thousands of people by briefly monitoring and
analyzing electronic mail "To:/From:" logs from a handful of sites.
It is difficult to protect against this sort
of invasion, because the needed data are not easily masked.  Privacy
Enhanced Mail does not protect against this type of
analysis, because the actual content of mail messages (which is what
PEM protects) is not needed for the analysis.  Protecting against this
type of traffic analysis would require generating
spurious traffic, to hide patterns in the real traffic.  Doing so
could be costly.

In some cases, users become more concerned about privacy when
directory information becomes more widely or easily accessible.  This
is the case with Campus Wide Information Systems that get connected to
the Internet, allowing people all over the world to locate information
that previously was available only to people within a university.
These problems also underlie some tension that has surrounded the
Netfind user directory service.
Originally, "finger" information was accessible only
within local campus internets.  As campuses connect to the Internet,
this information becomes accessible to anyone with Internet access.
Netfind makes it easy to harness this widely distributed information,
and use it as a directory service.  Because of this, some people have
suggested that Netfind poses a privacy invasion, even though it
provides no information that was not already publically available.

What can be done about these privacy problems?  A common approach is
to enact security barriers, to protect sensitive information.  Such
barriers help, but often the goals of privacy and security are not
well matched.  The priority in most security systems is to protect a
site's computer systems.  Personal privacy is only protected to the
extent that it overlaps with this goal.  Yet, in most of the above
examples, privacy could be threatened without violating a security
perimeter.  Moreover, in some cases privacy and security are at odds
with one another.  Every system administrator can tell a story of a
time when, in an effort to track down a security problem, they faced a
decision about whether to look into a personal mailbox for clues.

Security mechanisms represent policies that have been formalized to
the point of explicit controls over what users can do.  Often, less
formalized policies exist, in the form of proclaimed constraints on
acceptable activities.  For example, a university computing support
group might have written policies describing the conditions under
which a system administrator is allowed to inspect a personal mailbox.

Still less formal policies exist concerning what type of behavior is
acceptable when accessing machines across the Internet.  For example,
it is considered acceptable to login and retrieve files from a known
remote anonymous FTP file system, but it is not considered acceptable
to try to discover anonymous FTP servers by systematically attempting
to login to a list of machines.  In this case, the policy is really no
more than conventional wisdom that has developed over years of
collective Internet usage experiences.  Sometimes this type of
information is written down, in the form of new user guides.
Often, however, it exists simply as folklore.

A difficulty with defining privacy policies is that no governing body
has the authority to legislate and enforce global policies.  While a
number of groups have stepped forward to suggest policies,
there are no global privacy standards.  Indeed, different
countries currently have very different privacy laws and mechanisms.
Even within a country, one can see a range of
different directory privacy policy choices.  For example, in the
United States one extreme is occupied by mailing list brokers, which
compile lists of everyone they can locate (assisted by the U.S.  Post
Office), and offer no assured way for people to modify or restrict
access to the information listed about them.  Telephone companies have
a more moderate policy, listing everyone by default, but allowing
individuals to restrict the content or presence of their listings.
Still more moderate are the policies put forward by the North American
Directory Forum (NADF).  NADF advocates several principles, including
the right to be informed when a person's directory entry is created,
the right not to be listed, the right to correct inaccurate
information, and the right to remove specific information.

Notice that none of the above policies requires that users give prior
consent to be listed - which is often what people upset about privacy
intrusions really want.  Even the NADF policy allows users to enforce
their privacy preferences only after the information has been visible
for some initial period of time.  Given today's technology, even a
short period of time may be enough to spread private information to
many derived databases.

There are at least three reasons why privacy policies tend to be
weaker than individuals would like.  The first is ubiquity of
coverage.  A user directory is only valuable if it contains listings
for many people.  Requiring prior approval makes this goal nearly
unattainable.  The second problem is more vexing: invading privacy can
be very profitable (as in the case of direct mail marketing lists).
Third, governments often want to maintain more detailed information
about people than their citizens would like, in the name of national
security.

There are no easy solutions to privacy problems.  However, I have
three suggestions.  First, we need to educate users about the many
ways that networked information can invade their privacy.  In a sense,
networks represent an "electronic society", participation in which
brings with it some loss of privacy, just as being a member of any
society does.

Second, we need to increase the amount of research and development
oriented towards ensuring privacy.  Technical conferences on the
subject often focus almost entirely on system security, with few
papers about privacy.

Third, we need to form policies oriented towards current technology.
The world has changed substantially since the U.S.  Privacy Act of
1974 was introduced, and that legislation does not effectively address
many of the privacy problems that face us today (nor is it effectively
enforced).  One possibility would be for the U.S.
National Research Council to commission a study parallel to last
year's security study, focused on
privacy problems raised by networked information.  Or perhaps the
Internet Society could commission such a study, being an international
organization.

There are many other privacy problems introduced by electronic data
processing, beyond issues raised by Internet directory and information
services.  The interested reader can contact one of the offices of the
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (the main office
being in Palo Alto, California), or proceedings of the recent
conferences on Computers, Freedom & Privacy.

(-ed. References and citations in this article are available upon request
from Prof. Schwartz.)

*Professor, Computer Science Department
University of Colorado.

================================================
n-2-1-040.33.1

Towards an Internet Security Architecture: Part III
by Stephen Kent*
[e-mail]


        This is the third installment in a multi-part series
addressing architectural security issues in the Internet.  The columns
in this series explore various aspects of an Internet security
architecture as the community begins to explore these issues.  Some of
the material in this column reflects observations contained in the
chapter on Architectural Security in the "Internet System Handbook"
published by Addison Wesley in October 1992.  This installment
continues the exploration of security services, and security
mechanisms used to provide these services, using the terminology
introduced in ISO 7498-2, the OSI security architecture.

        As noted previously, security services are abstract
characterizations of security functionality, independent of the
underlying mechanisms used to implement the functionality.  Thus
security service definitions provide a helpful vocabulary for end
users, and network or application service providers, to express
security requirements.  These definitions also serve as a means for
protocol and application designers to express the security functions
provided by protocols and applications or required of an underlying
communication system.

        The second security service to be explored is that of
integrity.  Data afforded the integrity service is protected from
undetected, unauthorized modification.  ISO 7498-2 further
characterizes integrity as connection-oriented or connectionless,
depending on the communication protocol context for which the service
is provided.  The distinctions between these two forms of integrity
have real implications both in terms of the security features provided
to the client of the service and in terms of the mechanisms used to
implement the service.  In some ways the integrity security services
are analogous to the integrity services one expects of a reliable a
communication protocol.  However, a security-oriented integrity
service provides protection in the face of malicious attacks against
data whereas a reliability-oriented integrity service provides
protection against benign errors, accidents, acts of God, etc.

        Connectionless integrity is applied to individual packets or
messages.  This service strives to provide to the recipient of a
packet (message) with confidence that the received data has not been
modified enroute.  Note that a simple error detection code, e.g., a
CRC, is not, by itself, sufficient to afford this security service.
The reason is that a malicious attacker is presumed to be capable of
modifying a packet and computing a new CRC with a "correct" value.
This is an example of why the security mechanisms developed for benign
error situations are generally not sufficient to provide protection
against malicious attacks.

        Instead, integrity mechanisms for use in hostile environments
must be able to protect against attackers who are presumed to be
capable of performing any algorithmic transformation, e.g., checksum
calculation, that the sender or receiver can perform.  The only
"leverage" afforded the legitimate participants in a communication is
the knowledge of some secret quantities which may be shared between
the sender and receiver, or which may be linked to publically known
quantities (as in public-key cryptography).

        Numerous algorithms been developed for checking the integrity
of individual packets exchanged between a pair of communicating
parties, many of which are termed "manipulation detection codes."
Examples are codified in the ANSI X9.9 specification and the SNMP
security enhancements (e.g., RFC 1352).  For multi-cast environments,
more stringent techniques are required, to counter the possibility
that one of the legitimate recipient might attempt to modify a message
and pass it on to other recipients.  The Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM)
specifications (RFCs 1421-24) describe a means of providing integrity
in such environments.

        Connection-oriented integrity extends the connectionless
integrity guarantee to include detection of "any modification,
insertion, deletion, or replay of any data within a [packet]
sequence," according to ISO-7498-2.  This defines a fairly strict
integrity service well suited to a range of applications, e.g.,
virtual terminal and file transfer.  Such applications require that
absolutely all packets be delivered in sequence and without error.
However, this service characterization does not represent the extreme
on a spectrum of services.

        Applications such as packet speech or packet video will
function acceptably well even if some packets never arrive, or are
damaged.  However, these applicatins are sensitive to variability in
delays.  Thus integrity can be viewed as a multi-dimensional security
service.  This motivates the more general concept of "stream
integrity," which attempts to encompass a wide range of integrity
services which may be appropriate for varying applications.  Stream
integrity also seems a preferable service description since not some
of the applications which require more than simple connectionless
integrity do not make use of connection-oriented protocols.

        Mechanisms for providing stream integrity are quite varied.
No single stream integrity mechanism is ideal, or even appropriate,
for all applications, because of different application integrity
requirements.  Stream integrity techniques usually include the
connectionless integrity techniques alluded to above, then add
features such as non-repeating sequence numbers, timestamps,
challenge-response exchanges, etc.

        Finally, in isolation, integrity is not a very valuable
security service.  When an individual packet or message or a stream
of data arrives, the recipient usually wants to know not only that the
data has not been modified in any way, but also who transmitted the
data.  This latter service is referred to as authenticity and is the
topic of the next column.

*Chief Scientist
BBN Communications


================================================
n-2-1-040.33

Privacy and Security Research Group Workshop on Network
and Distributed System Security
by Jeffrey I. Schiller*,
<[e-mail]>


On February 11th and 12th, 1993 the Privacy and Security Research
Group held the first PSRG Workshop on Network and Distributed System
Security.  Co-sponsored by the Internet Society and the Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory, the workshop was held in San Diego, California
and attracted approximately 150 networking professionals from around
the globe.  The workshop was divided into two types of presentations,
paper sessions and panel sessions.  Papers ranging from policy making
to technical dissertation were presented.  Topic areas covered Privacy
for Large Networks, Electronic Documents, Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM),
and Practical Distributed System Security.

The panel sessions were designed to present the attendees with an
opportunity to discuss timely and in some cases controversial security
topics.  Panels included the question of in which layer(s) of the OSI
reference model security should be implemented in.  Smart cards and
their applications were discussed in another panel.  One panel
discussed exportable encryption algorithms (and what their use
implied).  The closing panel asked the question: "Should security be
legislated?" (i.e., should workstations have required security
features in the same way that automobiles and airliners must meet
safety standards).  Although each panel had several presenters, group
participation of all workshop attendees resulted from the extended
question and answer periods.

The workshop Banquet featured Scott Charney, Chief Computer Crime
Bureau of the U.S. Justice Department, going over the challenges
facing law enforcement when it comes to apprehending and prosecuting
computer criminals.  Among the issues covered he included a discussion
of the motivation behind the CERT's (Computer Emergency Response Team)
recent advice to warn network users of keystroke monitoring, a topic
that has spawned significant debate within the network community.
Scott explained that quirks in U.S. law rather then a desire to "spy
on the community" is behind the advice.

The session on Electronic Documents had papers presented on secure
electronic meeting management and secure electronic document handling.
Both papers presented ways to use networking, and the Internet, to
handle business/administrative tasks in a secure fashion.

The PEM session speakers presented papers covering the security issues
of implementating PEM in a multi-user UNIX environment and VAX/VMS PEM
implementation and user experiences.  An implementation of a hardware
certificate signing unit was presented, as well as a paper outlining
some of the subtle security issues (and solutions) for implementing
PEM with symmetric key cryptography.

The session on distributed systems discussed practical applications of
security technology, to the problems of distributed systems and shared
file systems.

All in all, the workshop was well attended and extremely productive.
The papers were excellent and the panel discussions enlightening.
Current plans call for this workshop to become an annual Symposium.
It is a Symposium worth investigating.  Be on the lookout for the next
Call for Papers!


*MIT Network Manager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

================================================
n-2-1-040.35

How Reliable are PTT International Links?
by Hank Nussbacher
<[e-mail]>

Nowadays, countries order high speed data communications links for
hundreds of thousands of dollars.  For example, Israel spends $207,000
per year on a 128kb satellite line to the USA and another $140,000 per
year on a 64/kb fiber link to Europe.  But just how reliable are those
expensive circuits to abroad?

The CCITT (International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative
Committee) has stated that intercontinental circuits should not
experience more than 3 hours per month down time (99.6% up time) and
that continental links should not experience more than 1 hour down
time (99.9% up time).

Unfortunately, a recent INTUG (International Telecommunications User
Group) report that monitors various PTTs throughout the world, shows
that on average 64kb circuits are available only 99.03% (7 hours per
month downtime).

How has Bezek, the Israeli monopoly PTT, been doing compared to its
European cousins?  The table below uses two international circuits for
the basis of its analysis: a satellite 64kb (128kb as of 26 January
1993) circuit from Weizmann Institute in Rehovot to New York City
(USA) and a second 64kb circuit that goes via the EMOS, a fiber optic
undersea link, from Tel Aviv University to Geneva.  This table shows
that Bezek is more or less on par with around 99.1% uptime for
international circuits, but which is clearly below the CCITT
recommendation of 99.6% uptime.  IDB, the USA carrier for the other
half of the USA-Israel circuit, states in their contract that
reliability will not be less than 99.5%.  Clearly, they do not reach
that objective.


       Israel-USA                 |       Israel-Europe
       (satellite)                | (EMOS - fiber optic cable)
                                  |
                                  |
Month   Downtime  # of      %     | Downtime  # of      %
        in min.   failures  avail | in min.   failures  avail
------  --------  --------  ----- | --------  --------  -----
Jul 92   462       20       99.0  |  532       24       98.9
Aug 92   657       68       98.5  |  300       15       99.3
Sep 92   424       47       99.1  |  276       14       99.4
Oct 92   100       25       99.8  |  230       89       99.5
Nov 92   524       26       98.8  |  297       31       99.3
Dec 92    28       17       99.9  |  134       37       99.6
Jan 93   568       32       98.7  | 1114       88       97.5


What are the major causes of a digital telecommunications circuit to
go out of service?  Synchronization and multiplexing signals on high
bandwidth international links is more complicated than on slower speed
analog links.  Synchronizing at the international level is
particularly tricky because different carriers (PTTs) often use
different signalling schemes.  These synchronization problems usually
result in a link disruption of under 2 minutes, long enough to force
users off a remote application.

For example, over the period of October 3rd & 4th, the circuit from
Israel to Geneva had 64 line failures, each on average 18 seconds in
length.  Fortunately, we use equipment that requires only 10 seconds
to recover full user connectivity in the event of a line failure.  But
someone who would be using certain vendor equipment that would require
a reboot after every line failure, may experience 20-30 minute outages
for every 18 second line synchronization problem.

Due to the fact that different PTTs use different signalling
standards, it is close to impossible for PTTs to monitor digital
circuits and instead wait for customers to call them to report circuit
outages.  PTTs usually show higher availability statistics than
customers, since they only start their "down clock" when a customer
reports the problem, which is often 15-30 minutes after the line has
gone down.

Interestingly enough, the higher the data speed, the more reliable the
digital data circuit (from the INTUG report):


                Speed        Uptime
                ------       ------
                768kb        99.99%
                384kb        99.94
                1544kb (T1)  99.94
                1024kb       99.9
                128kb        99.88
                1984kb       99.88
                512kb        99.87
                2048kb (E1)  99.56
                64kb         99.03
                256kb        97

Looking at the above table, users would be recommended to stay away
from 256kb circuits and to upgrade as fast as possible from 64kb to
128kb circuits.  Almost all higher speed lines (other than 64kb and
256kb) meet the CCITT recommendations.

I would be interested in forming a group in the Internet to discuss
these matters and to exchange statistics, and I am prepared to
coordinate the matter as well as attempt to prepare coordinated
reports on link uptime and reliability of lines based on country.
Those interested in discussing this, should send me e-mail at the
address stated above and if we get enough of a turnout, we might be
able to improve the reliability of our leased lines.

================================================
n-1-4-040.51
User Services
by Joyce K. Reynolds*
 <[e-mail]>

On 5 January 1993, the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Network
Information Services Awards were announced.  Enclosed is an
abbreviated announcement of this new and important award for the
Internet community.

In cooperation with the Internet community, the National Science
Foundation developed and released, in the spring of 1992, Project
Solicitation for one or more Network Information Services Managers to
provide and/or coordinate (i) Registration Services, (ii) Directory
and Database Services, and (iii) Information Services for the NSFNET.
As a result of this solicitation, three separate organizations were
competitively selected.  Together, these three awards constitute the
NIS Manager Project, named the INTERNIC.  Network Solutions will
provide registration services, AT&T will provide directory and
database services, and General Atomics will provide information
services.  The three awardees have developed a detailed concept and
plan to provide this seamless interface called the "INTERNIC" and have
agreed to the structuring of their three separate awards as one
collaborative project.

Network Solutions will provide registration services as the IP
registrar, issue IP numbers worldwide using delegated registries under
the guidance of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and also
register domain names, and track points of contact.  Applications for
assignment will be accepted via email or facsimile.  The information
from these assignments will be provided to the directory and database
services provider to be made available to the entire Internet
community.  As a part of the Domain registration efforts Network
Solutions will periodically release the top level zone files to be
used by all root Domain Name servers.

AT&T will develop and maintain a Directory of Directories, including
lists of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, lists of various types of
servers available on the Internet, lists of white and yellow page
directories, library catalogs and data archives. AT&T will also
provide white and yellow pages type Directory Services. Access to
these services will initially be provided through several currently
popular in-use interface methods while migrating to the use of X.500
technology, the current standard specification for distributed
information storage and retrieval.  The database services which AT&T
will provide include the establishment of Database Services to extend
and supplement the resources of the NSFNET, such as extend and
supplement the resources of the NSFNET, such as databases of
contributed materials of common interest to the user community.  AT&T
will also offer database design, management, and maintenance to
institutions and groups for inclusion in the Internet.

General Atomics will provide Information Services acting as the NIC of
first and last resort and the NIC of NICs.  The INTERNIC information
services will include a full-service Reference Desk, a database of
comprehensive networking materials called the Info Source, training
classes and documentation, and coordination services among all
appropriate groups in the community.  In keeping with the innovative
spirit of the Internet, several new approaches to distributing
services will be implemented.  Among these innovations is NICLink, a
user-friendly hypermedia interface offering access to the Info Source
and all the information it contains.  NICLink will be distributed on
both standard computer diskettes and CD-ROM.  Another is the concept
of the Info Scout, an individual who will scout out new resources and
innovative uses of the network for inclusion in the Info Source.

National Science Foundation Contact     Network Solutions Contact
Don Mitchell                            Mary Bloch
[phone]                          [phone]
[e-mail]                        [e-mail]

AT&T Contact                            General Atomics Contact
Shelly London                           Susan Calcari
[phone]                          [phone]
[e-mail]                      [e-mail]


*Member of the Technical Staff, Information Sciences Instititue,
University of Southern California

================================================
n-2-1-040.68

All You Didn't Want to Know About BITNET and Were Afraid To Ask
by Eric Thomas
<[e-mail]>

BITNET's store-and-forward technology may not deliver the best round
trip figures for electronic mail, but there is one area in which it
outperforms current Internet technology by a large factor: bulk mail
delivery.  This article will show that, contrary to popular belief,
this difference is not made irrelevant by upgrading your access line
to T1.

In a previous article ("What's the Response Time", by Frode Greisen
and Greg Lloyd), we saw that the average round-trip time for a typical
50-lines mail message over the EARN backbone is on the order of
300-400 seconds, or about 3 minutes for the one-way trip.  Even though
these figures include downtime and some of the countries on the EARN
backbone do not have satisfactory connectivity, this is still pretty
unimpressive.  Even between well-connected countries, the average
transmission time would be on the order of 30-90 seconds during peak
hours, assuming the lines are up.  Between the same machines, SMTP
delivers the same message in 5 seconds, maybe 10 if the machines are
loaded.

So why aren't the BITNET folks working on dismantling this outdated
technology and migrating everything to IP?  Well, we computer people
can compare figures and argue about the conditions of our benchmarks
to our heart's content, but the reality is that users don't care
whether a message is delivered in 5 seconds or 2 minutes.  It took them
5 minutes to type it, usually with two fingers, and as long as it gets
there within some 10-15 minutes they will be satisfied.  That is,
genuine end-users aren't going to judge a technology solely on whether
it takes 5 seconds or 2 minutes to deliver a piece of mail; this will
be just a minor factor among many others in their overall evaluation
of the service.

Now, while Joe Bitnetter is willing to wait 10-15 minutes for his
message to be delivered, he of course expects the message to be
delivered within that 10-15 minutes period regardless of whether it
was sent to a single person or to a mailing list.  After all, the
network handles millions of messages a day, so a couple thousand
additional messages should make no difference.  And this is, indeed,
the way the post office works: a thousand letters mailed first class
take the same time to arrive as a single one.

And here it is where the Internet fails to deliver.  The round trip
time observed on the IETF list (from a T1-connected site) ranges from
30 minutes to several hours.  The message gets to CNRI in less than
one minute, but takes about an hour to come back.

BITNET, on the other hand, uses a bulk delivery algorithm known as
"DISTRIBUTE", which uses knowledge of the topology to optimize the
distribution in a store-and-forward fashion.  There are about 150
DISTRIBUTE servers spanning 28 countries, and the distribution
algorithm ensures that a single copy of the message is sent over any
given "link" (originally these were actual, physical leased lines,
nowadays they are mostly virtual TCP circuits between designated
machines).  For instance, a LISTSERV somewhere in California could
forward a copy of the message to a server on the East Coast, which
would fan it out to a number of other East Coast servers and send a
copy to Stockholm, where the message would be delivered to recipients
in Sweden and then passed on to Poland and Finland - and so on.  A
study has shown that, on the average, this reduces the load by a
factor of 5 to 25, depending on the topology and usage patterns.  Note
that 35-40% of BITNET mailing lists are highly-specialized interest
groups with around 100 recipients or less: the savings are of course
higher with larger lists.

The bandwidth saved through this algorithm is clearly a gold mine to
countries with a weak economy, such as eastern countries, which simply
haven't got the money to purchase fast lines (leased lines usually
have to be paid for in hard currency).  With two 64k connections,
Poland is by far the best connected eastern country, and that was
accomplished (partly) through subsidies.  If a particular software
technology can reduce the bandwidth used up by e-mail by a factor of
10, you will have a hard time convincing countries connected at 9.6k
or even 64k that this is a minor side-effect of an obsolete technology
they should strive to migrate away from.  Unless, of course, you get
them a free ride on a T1 in exchange.

In addition to this purely financial benefit, we come to another
significant aspect of this distribution mechanism: it evens out the
cost of delivering messages to mailing lists of more than a couple
hundred subscribers.   It doesn't make much of a difference for the
network backbone whether there are 500 or 10,000 recipients, because
the message will have to be delivered to (almost) all the
participating DISTRIBUTE servers in both cases.  The difference is that
there will be a lot more deliveries on local area networks and
faster/cheaper regional lines, which usually aren't backlogged.  This
is why BITNET passes the "post office" test in regions without chronic
bandwidth problems (and considerably eases the load on regions which
do have continuous backlogs).

To quantify that point, we conducted an experiment with a moderately
large but pretty active list (about 1,200 recipients and over 100
daily postings), hosted in the US.  We selected two "guinea pig"
accounts, one in the US (but in a different State) and one in Poland.
Both accounts were subscribed three times to the mailing list, under
different incarnations: once with the machine's BITNET address, once
with an Internet address for which a "site gateway" had been
registered in the BITNET gateways database, and once with an Internet
address for which no particular gateway was defined (in fact we used
source-routing in the second case to simulate the behaviour we wanted,
since the sites in question had chosen not to register any "site
gateway").  We were careful to add the addresses in the middle of the
list file, so that they wouldn't get unfair (or "too fair") treatment.
We then recorded the arrival time of the various "triplets" on a 24
hour cycle, to compare the relative efficiency of the 3 delivery
methods:

        1. BITNET/NJE all the way.

        2. BITNET/NJE to the "site gateway", then SMTP to the final
           mailbox.

        3. SMTP all the way.

In all but one case, the first method was the fastest.  The round trip
time (between 'Date:' time stamp and last 'Received:' field) was on
the order of 10 minutes for the US recipient and 15 for the Polish
one, give or take a couple minutes (the clocks of the various machines
were not synchronized and we had no time to check the offset of the
individual clocks of each and every poster on that day).  On the
average, the copy sent to the "type 2" address arrived 1 minute 30
seconds later for the US recipient and 4 minutes 40 seconds later for
the Polish recipient.

However, the copy with the plain "type 3" Internet address (SMTP all
the way) arrived more than an hour after the other two, for both
addressees.  Now, this might be excusable for the Polish address,
since the IP route to this host is usually saturated, but what about
the T1-connected US university?  What would they tell Joe
(ex-)Bitnetter if they were to leave BITNET and he suddenly had to
wait an extra hour for his copy of all postings to medium-to-large
mailing lists?  On active lists, getting everything 1 hour after
everyone else may effectively cut you from the argument: by the time
your reply arrives, it is already 2 hours older than what the BITNET
folks have posted and you are probably just repeating what other
people said before - and giving the unfortunate impression that you
don't read what has been said before replying.

Of course, one way to address this problem is to buy faster lines and
bigger machines, thus making it possible for SMTP servers to handle
500 concurrent TCP connections and 5,000 outstanding name server
queries, and then run name servers which can take 20,000 simultaneous
queries without timing out a single one.  The technology to handle
such workload exists, even though cost and other factors have caused
it not to be widely deployed.  But why not use smaller machines that
do a good job because they only need to deliver a dozen copies of a
message, rather than machines which are so big that they can handle
the full 1200, every third minute during peak hours, for each of the
hundreds of large mailing lists we now have?  As the network and its
community grows, there is no limit to the further resources a
"non-DISTRIBUTE" delivery system will require.

LISTSERV is delivering 2-6 million messages a day without hassle -
without anything special to do when creating a large list, and without
having to worry about finding a suitable newsgroup to move the
discussion to once the list grows large.  The distribution is
efficient, not only in terms of bandwidth and computer resources
(about one second of CPU time per thousand recipients on the smallest
machines you can buy from IBM, rated at just 3 S/370 MIPS), but above
all in terms of manpower.  The system takes care of itself and you
don't have to press people to set up local redistributions to avoid
saturating your machine or getting complaints from your local network
or system administrator.

While this distribution mechanism is implemented over BITNET, it can,
like most other LISTSERV services, be used from the Internet without
problem.  In fact, you can take advantage of DISTRIBUTE to optimize
the turnaround time of your sendmail exploders, simply by entrusting
the delivery to the DISTRIBUTE backbone, as explained in informational
RFC 1429 (Listserv Distribute Protocol).

Furthermore, a number of projects are underway to improve the
efficiency of this distribution mechanism for Internet recipients (for
which it is difficult to obtain accurate topological information).
LISTSERV is being modified to support "network aware" mode in
Internet-only environments; that is, within a few months it will be
possible to install fully functional LISTSERV servers on VM systems
without BITNET connectivity, and these servers will be able to
participate to the DISTRIBUTE backbone.  Another project concerns
itself with the collection of topological data for the Internet,
without which there can be no efficient distribution.  The EARN
Association, in particular, is going to review the possibility of
collecting, updating and maintaining such information in a standard
form as a value-added service to its membership.

================================================
n-2-1-040.70

USENET
by Rick Adams
<[e-mail]>

[graphics separately provided}

================================================
n-2-1-040.90

News from RARE
by Josefien Bersee
<[e-mail]>


START-UP CONTRACT OPERATIONAL UNIT SIGNED BY RARE

The setting up of the Operational Unit for the provision of networking
services to the European research community is progressing.  RARE -
acting on behalf of the OU - has signed the contract with the CEC for
the start-up of the OU, which will be located in Cambridge in the UK.

RARE TECHNICAL COMMITTEE REAPPOINTED

The RARE Technical Committee, the expert body guiding all RARE's
technical activities since April last year has been reappointed for a
two years' term, ending 1 May 1995.  In addition to the existing
members, Milan Sterba (Prague School of Economics) was designated to
represent RIPE.  Currently there is one vacancy, as Eike Jessen had to
resign.

The current RTC is chaired by Tomaz Kalin, RARE Secretary-General; Tim
Dixon, RARE Project Development Officer acts as Secretary. Other
members are: Brian Gilmore (Edinburgh University, United Kingdom),
Erik Huizer (SURFnet, Netherlands), Jean-Paul Le Guigner (CICB,
France), Bernhard Plattner (ETH Zuerich, Switzerland) and Sven
Tafvelin (NORDUnet, Chalmers Technical Institute, Sweden).  Howard
Davies (RARE Vice-President, University of Exeter, UK) liaises between
the RTC and the RARE Executive Committee and Christian Huitema (INRIA,
France) liaises between RARE and the Internet Architecture Board.

PUBLICATION OF RARE/EARN JOURNAL

During its last meeting in Luxembourg in February, the RARE Council of
Administration approved the budget for the production of a paper
version of a new journal jointly published by RARE and EARN.  The new
publication will appear as quarterly supplement to the Elsevier North
Holland Journal, "Computer Networks and ISDN Systems".  The first issue
is planned to be published in Spring 1993.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME 4TH JENC AVAILABLE

The preliminary programme and registration form for the 4th Joint
European Networking Conference is now available from the RARE
Secretariat, on paper as well as electronically.  The conference will
be held in Trondheim, Norway, at the campus of the Norwegian Institute
of Technology.

NEW PROJECT DEVELOPMENT OFFICER AT RARE SECRETARIAT

Jeroen Houttuin has started work as PDO at the RARE Secretariat in
Amsterdam on January 1st.  He studied telematics at the University of
Twente and has been involved in R&D networking projects at GMD-FOKUS,
ETH Zuerich, and SWITCH.  He participated in the COSINE MHS Project
Team.  Jeroen will be involved in RARE Working Group activities,
upper-layer related issues in particular.

================================================
n-2-1-050.01

NEW ADMINISTRATION BACKS INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAYS
by Mike Roberts
<[e-mail]>


At a well publicized meeting in Silicon Valley in late February,
President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore announced a technology
initiative for their new administration with potentially up to US $20
billion in funding over the next several years.

Contained within the plan is a major initiative for "Information
Superhighways" that is intended to build on Vice President Gore's
previous support for a National Research and Education Network (NREN)
and expand it to include investment in the information infrastructure of
the entire U.S.  Specific investments are targeted for networking
support in education at all levels, in manufacturing technology, health
care, and lifelong learning.

Although the announcement covered many areas of interest to the
networking community, details are still sparse.  The Administration will
not release its detailed budget for FY94, which begins 1 October 1993,
until the first week of April.  Many important positions in the federal
executive necessary to carry out the initiative are still vacant.

Controversy has arisen over whether the Clinton Administration intends
that the federal government have an operational role in a national high
performance computer network.  Many American telecommunications firms
are anxious to avoid any expansion of federal activity in markets they
consider already too regulated.

At the same time, public interest advocates are concerned that excessive
reliance on market forces will exclude many citizens from network
access, thus impacting their ability to acquire necessary work skills in
an increasingly information based economy.

In the Congress, both House and Senate members have introduced
legislation dealing with aspects of networking, ranging from
telecommunications policy to the assignment of network responsibilities
to several federal agencies.

Both the U.S. computer industry and the university community have called
for the appointment of a high level official to manage the large scale
networking effort being undertaken by the new Administration.  Thus far,
this step is being resisted by forces within federal agencies and their
Congressional sponsors whose prerogatives might be adversely affected as
a result of putting a single individual in charge.

================================================
n-2-1-075.01
 by Deborah Estrin
<[e-mail]>

Internetworking: Research and Experience is a quarterly, refereed
journal published by Wiley (D.  Comer, R. Droms, D. Estrin, and L.
Svobodova are the editors.)

In the second 1993 issue of the journal there are two papers of
interest to the ISOC community.  The papers represent the diversity of
research in the field, from modeling to protocol design and
experimentation.

"Model and Analysis of a Virtual Circuit with Cross Traffic", by B.
Jain (IIT), A. Agrawala, and Dheeraj Sanghi (Univ. Maryland), models
the flow of packets between a source and destination host, while
taking into account processing and competing cross-traffic in the
network elements (switches).  The model's predictions of inter-packet
departure time as a function of inter-packet send time are analyzed
and compared to measurements taken between host pairs on the Internet.

"Inter-Domain Routing Protocol" by Y. Rekhter (IBM), describes and
analyzes a protocol for inter-domain routing based on a Path Vector
algorithm. Path vector protocols are distributed in the sense of
distance vector protocols, however they avoid loops by including the
full domain-level path in each routing entry, in addition to the usual
(destination, distance) tuple found in most distance vector protocols.
IDRP has been designed to accommodate networks of virtually unlimited
size; for example, aggregation of routing information is widely
deployed, and at the same time, flexible aggregation is widely
supported.  The protocol was developed originally for OSI routing but
can be applied to IP routing as well.

================================================
n-2-1-075.04

ConneXions
by Ole J Jacobsen*
<[e-mail]>

The March 1993 edition of ConneXions is a special issue devoted to
INTEROP 93 Spring (March 8 - 12 in Washington, DC). This edition
starts with an article on the INTEROPnet, INTEROP's unique show
network to which all exhibitors are required to connect and
demonstrate interoperability. This is followed by and article on APPI,
the alternative to IBM's APPN. OSF's Distributed Computing Environment
(DCE) is described next, as well as the soon-to-debut Internet Talk
Radio.  Finally you will find an article entitled "Multiprotocol
Internets: User's Best Hope for Open Systems." The article describes
several important trends in the networking marketplace.

We are pleased to offer all Internet Society members a 20% discount on
ConneXions subscription. Indicate your membership number on the order
form. For a complimentary sample issue, list of back issues and
subscription information, please send e-mail with your POSTAL address
to [e-mail].

Future INTEROP dates and locations:
-----------------------------------
INTEROP 93 Fall:         San Francisco, CA, August 23 - 27, 1993
INTEROP 93 Europe:       Paris, France,     October 25 - 29, 1993
NETWORLD + INTEROP 94    Las Vegas, NV,     May 2 - 6, 1994
NETWORLD + INTEROP 94    Atlanta, GA,       September 12 - 16, 1994


*Editor and Publisher
ConneXions--The Interoperability Report
Interop Company

================================================
n-2-1-075.05

Computer Networks and ISDN Systems
by Philip H. Enslow, Jr.*,
<[e-mail]>


Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Published by North Holland,
Amsterdam.


As reported previously, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems is now
published twelve times a year.  We are well along into the 1993 volume
with issue number 7 having just been received by subscribers.  Volume
25, Number 7, February, 1993 is a special issue on, "Tools for FDTs"
with Juan Quemada as the Guest Editor.  Plans are underway to
significantly increase the coverage of research networking in Europe.
More on that in the next issue of ISOC News.


*Editor-in-Chief, "Computer Networks and ISDN Systems"

================================================
n-2-1-075.06

Matrix News
by John S. Quarterman*
[e-mail]

]*indicates italics*]

The December 1992 *Matrix News* included a technical overview of ``MIME:
Multimedia Across the Internet,'' by Mark Thacker, an essay on ``Paying
for Internet Goods and Services...,'' by Peter Deutsch, and an
extensive list of ``Recent Internet Books,'' by John Quarterman, with a
table comparing the books by length, type, price, intended audience,
and type (e.g., user guide, travelog, or textbook).  You'll probably
find your favorite book in the list.  If not, let us know.  We're
always publishing more reviews and adding to the list.

The January 1993 issue contained much of the paper trail Gordon Cook
compiled in his investigation of ``NSFnet Privatization,'' by use of
the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  This is extended excerpts from
the actual documents, with very little editorializing.  In the same
issue, Eric Theise reviewed the book ``Zen and the Art of the Internet,''
by Brendan Kehoe, and Smoot Carl-Mitchell reviewed two items from
InfoMagic: a CD-ROM with many documents and software, and a set of
floppy disks.  Both have RFCs; the disks have them in Hypertext.  We
also ran the announcement by NFS of the ``Network Information Services
Awards'' and the announcement by EFF of ``Major Changes at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.''

For February 1993 we have a special *Matrix News* issue with one article,
``Maps of Networks by Country.'' This article consists almost entirely
of bar graph maps, with a bar over each country or region, showing the
number of hosts on a network in that area.  There are maps for each of
FidoNet, UUCP, BITNET, and the Internet.  Each network is shown in each
of the world, Europe, and the United States, for twelve maps total.

The March 1993 issue of *Matrix News* will have some material on
the most networked countries, the most northerly and southerly
networked places, and a bit of a graphical surprise, in color.

*Matrix Information and Directory Services, Inc. (MIDS)
tel:[phone]

================================================
n-2-1-100.08

IFIP News
by Howard L. Funk
<[e-mail]>

IFIP mourns the death of its key founder, Mr. Isacc L. Auerbach, who
died of myelofibrosis on 24 December 1992. He was instrumental in the
creation of IFP and served as its first president from 1960 to 1965.
We owe him an immeasurable debt.

FOCUS, the United Representative to IFIP has elected new officers.
Dr. Robert M. Aiken - Chair; Dr. Mario R. Barbacci - Secretary/Treasurer:
Dr. Stuart H. Zweben, Dr. J. Tom Cain, and Prof. Gordon B. Davis -
Directors.

Through the good offices of the Internet Society information about
IFIP and FOCUS now lives on GOPHER. The ftp repository is
software.watson.ibm.com in the /pub/ifip directory. The listserve
repository is in LISTSERV@CEARN (request index txt to see what is
available).

Last September the IFIP Technical Assembly approved the formation of
a Working Group on Human-Computer Interaction and People with
Special Needs. For additional information contact the Chair of this
group, Porf. J. Gonzales-Abascal ([e-mail]).

The Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS)
met in Vienna in March. IFIP decided to hold its Council meeting in
Vienna during the same week to give the leadership of both organizations
the opportunity to meet to discuss future relationships.

The following meetings may be of special interest to members of the
Internet Society.

Third International Symposium of Integrated Network Management, 18-23
April 93, San Francisco, USA.

Ninth International Conference on Computer Security, 12-14 May 93,
Toronto, Canada.

Thirteenth International Symposium on Protocol Specification, Testing,
and Verification, 25-28 May 93, Leige, Belgium.

First Working Conference on Development and Implementation of
Computer-Based Information and Communications Networks, 16-18 June 93,
Vienna, Austria.

For additional information about any of these events contact the
IFIP Secretariat: [e-mail].

================================================
n-2-1-900.07
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)
by Jon Postel*
<[e-mail]>


The research groups of the IRTF are oriented towards longer term
Internet research issues.  The research groups tend to be small (that
is, about 10 to 20 people), and to have consistent membership.  The
results of the research groups tend to be experiments in new protocol
ideas, new applications, and new approaches.  Any results of research
groups that are appropriate for wide spread use in the Internet are
submitted to the normal IETF standards process.  Many of the
participants in the research groups are also active in the computer
science research community and there is a healthy interaction between
the work in the research groups and work in other venues (such as ACM
SIGCOMM).

The IRTF is composed of the following research groups:

        Research Group Name     Chair
        -------------------     ----------------
        Autonomous Networks     Deborah Estrin (USC)
        End-to-End Services     Bob Braden (ISI)
        Resource Discovery      Mike Schwartz (U Colorado)
        Privacy and Security    Steve Kent (BBN)
        Libraries               Cliff Lynch (UCOP)

The IRTF Steering Group (IRSG) is composed of the research group
chairs (above) and the following at large members:

        Dave Clark (MIT)
        Dave Mills (UDEL)
        Bruce Schatz (U Arizona)


*Associate Director for Networking HPCC Division, Information Sciences
Institute, University of Southern California


================================================
n-2-1-900.08

Note from the RFC-Editor
by Jon Postel*
<[e-mail]>


Request for Comments documents (RFCs) are now available via FTP from
at least 20 on-line repositories around the world, and at least 6 of
these provide automated retrieval via email.

A complete listing of these sources and other "help" information about
accessing RFCs can be obtained via an email request to the RFC-INFO
service:

        To: [e-mail]
        Subject: Accessing RFCs

        Help: ways_to_get_rfcs

In the last five months, 61 RFCs have been published.

        Oct     Nov     Dec     Jan     Feb
        10      10      1       27      13

The most recent summary of the status of various standards and their
corresponding RFCs is "IAB Official Protocol Standards" which is STD-1
and RFC-1360.


*Associate Director for Networking HPCC Division, Information Sciences
Institute, University of Southern California

================================================
n-1-2-900.09

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
 by JonPostel*
 <[e-mail]>


The IANA is the central coordinator for the assignment of unique
parameter values.  Requests for parameter assignments should be sent
to <[e-mail]>.

The most recent summary of these assigned parameter values is
"Assigned Numbers" which is STD-2 and RFC-1340.


*Associate Director for Networking HPCC Division, Information Sciences
Institute, University of Southern California

================================================
n-2-1-900.12

Standards Actions
by Steve Coya*
<[e-mail]>

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved or recommended
the following twenty-two (22) actions between 1 January 1993 and 28 February
1993:

   o  Network Time Protocol <rfc1305> as a Draft Standard.
   o  A String Representation of Distinguished Names
      <draft-ietf-osids-distnames> as a Proposed Standard.
   o  Using the OSI Directory to Achieve User Friendly Naming
      <draft-ietf-osids-friendlynaming> as an Experimental Protocol.
   o  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I: Message
      Encryption and Authentication Procedures <draft-ietf-pem-msgproc>
      as a Proposed Standard.
   o  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part II:
      Certificate-Based Key Management <draft-ietf-pem-keymgmt> as a
      Proposed Standard.
   o  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part III:
      Algorithms, Modes, and Identifiers <draft-ietf-pem-algorithms> as
      a Proposed Standard.
   o  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part IV: Key
      Certification and Related Services <draft-ietf-pem-forms> as a
      Proposed Standard.
   o  Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS1 Interface Type <rfc1232>
      now has a status of Historic.
   o  Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3 Interface Type <rfc1233>
      now has a status of Historic.
   o  Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS1 and E1 Interface Types
      <draft-ietf-trunkmib-ds1e1mib> as a Proposed Standard.
   o  Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3/E3 Interface Type
      <draft-ietf-trunkmib-ds3e3mib> as a Proposed Standard.
   o  FYI on a Network Management Tool Catalog: Tools for Monitoring and
      Debugging TCP/IP Internets and Interconnected Devices
      <draft-ietf-noctool2-debug-tcpip> as an Informational Document
   o  SMTP Service Extensions <draft-rose-extensions> as a Proposed
      Standard.
   o  SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration
      <draft-moore-extension-size> as a Proposed Standard.
   o  Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8Bit-SMTP/MIME
      <draft-ietf-smtpext-transition> as an Informational Document
   o  SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport
      <draft-ietf-smtpext-8bit-mime> as a Proposed Standard.
   o  Mapping between X.400(1984/1988) and Mail-11 (DECnet mail)
      <draft-ietf-x400ops-mapsmail> as an Experimental Protocol.
   o  Lightweight Directory Access Protocol <draft-ietf-osids-lightdirect>
      as a Proposed Standard.
   o  The String Representation of Standard Attribute Syntaxes
      <draft-ietf-osids-syntaxes> as a Proposed Standard.
   o  Internet Users' Glossary <draft-ietf-userglos-glossary> as an
      Informational Document
   o  Directed ARP <draft-ietf-iplpdn-directed_arp> as an Experimental
      Protocol.
   o  DUA Metrics <draft-ietf-osids-dua-metrics> as an Informational
      Document

Forty (40) Requests for Comments (RFC) were published between 1 January
and 28 February 1993:

  RFC       St  Title
  -------   --  -------------------------------------
  RFC1384   I   Naming Guidelines for Directory Pilots
  RFC1387   I   RIP Version 2 Protocol Analysis
  RFC1388   PS  RIP Version 2 Carrying Additional Information
  RFC1389   PS  RIP Version 2 MIB Extension
  RFC1390   S   Transmission of IP and ARP over FDDI Networks
  RFC1391   I   The Tao of IETF: A Guide for New Attendees of the Internet
                Engineering Task Force
  RFC1392   I   Internet Users' Glossary
  RFC1393   E   Traceroute Using an IP Option
  RFC1394   I   Relationship of Telex Answerback Codes to Internet Domains

  RFC1395   I   BOOTP Vendor Information Extensions
  RFC1396   I   The Process for Organization of Internet Standards Working
                Group (POISED)
  RFC1397   PS  Default Route Advertisement In BGP2 And BGP3 Versions Of
                The Border Gateway Protocol
  RFC1398   DS  Definitions of Managed Objects for the Ethernet-like
                Interface Types
  RFC1401   I   Correspondence between the IAB and DISA on the use of DNS
                throughout the Internet
  RFC1402   I   There's Gold in them thar Networks! Searching for Treasure
                in all the Wrong Places
  RFC1403   PS  BGP OSPF Interaction
  RFC1404   I   A Model for Common Operational Statistics
  RFC1405   E   Mapping between X.400(1984/1988) and Mail-11 (DECnet mail)
  RFC1406   PS  Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS1 and E1
                Interface Types
  RFC1407   PS  Definitions of Managed Objects for the DS3/E3 Interface
                Type
  RFC1408   PS  Telnet Environment Option
  RFC1409   E   Telnet Authentication Option
  RFC1411   E   Telnet Authentication: Kerberos Version 4
  RFC1412   E   Telnet Authentication : SPX
  RFC1413   PS  Identification Server
  RFC1414   PS  Ident MIB
  RFC1415   PS  FTP-FTAM Gateway Specification
  RFC1416   E   Telnet Authentication Option
  RFC1417   I   NADF Standing Documents: A Brief Overview
  RFC1421   PS  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part I:
                Message Encryption and Authentication Procedures
  RFC1422   PS  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part
                II: Certificate-Based Key Management
  RFC1423   PS  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part
                III: Algorithms, Modes, and Identifiers
  RFC1424   PS  Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail: Part
                IV: Key Certification and Related Services
  RFC1425   PS  SMTP Service Extensions
  RFC1426   PS  SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport
  RFC1427   PS  SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration
  RFC1428   I   Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to
                8Bit-SMTP/MIME
  RFC1429   I   Listserv Distribute Protocol
  RFC1430   I   A Strategic Plan for Deploying an Internet X.500 Directory
                Service
  RFC1431   I   DUA Metrics


Key to RFC Status: S Internet Standard
                   PS Proposed Standard
                   DS Draft Standard
                   E Experimental
                   I Informational

* Executive Director, IETF Secretariat

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Silicon Valley Realtors on the Internet

A recent issue of the Palo Alto Weekly carried a full-page ad for a
Realty Company in Saratoga California. Like most such advertisements,
it has a photograph of each of the 35 realtors who work for the agency.
Under each photograph is an Internet address of them.

================================================
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4th JOINT EUROPEAN NETWORKING CONFERENCE

The 4TH Joint European Networking Conference will take place
in Trondheim, Norway, from May 10-13, 1993.

Theme of the conference is: "EUROPEAN RESEARCH NETWORKING IN A GLOBAL
CONTEXT"

The event is organized by RARE in cooperation with: ACM SIGCOMM, EARN,
EUnet/EurOpen, IFIP TC6, Internet Architecture Board, Internet Society,
NORDUnet, and UNINETT.  The conference will be held at the main campus
of the Norwegian Institute of Technology

The programme includes a wide variety of technical, operational, and
developmental topics.

This year for the first time tutorials will be organized, and held
at the end of the Conference.

The registration fee includes the full set of papers as they will be
presented during the conference, and all festivities.

For more information: RARE Secretariat, Josefien Bersee ([e-mail])

================================================
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_The Internet Society's On-Line Information Services_
by John W. Stewart III
<[e-mail]>

The Internet Society has taken steps to make it easier for people
to access information of interest to ISOC members. Information is
available via Gopher, anonymous FTP, and WAIS servers, all at
ietf.cnri.reston.va.us.

(An introduction to Gopher can be found via anonymous FTP on
boombox.micro.umn.edu under:

      /pub/gopher/gopher_protocol/protocol.txt.)

The Gopher is currently configured to provide information about the
Internet Society, Internet Engineering Task Force, International
Federation for Information Processing and, as a special bonus, US
White House press releases. For all three of these organizations,
the Gopher provides text files, gateways to anonymous FTP areas,
and gateways for keyword searching of documents. The Internet
Society News is accessible on-line through these services.

The anonymous FTP files of particular interest are in sub-
directories:  iesg, ietf, ietf-mail-archive, internet-drafts and
isoc.

WAIS information databases of interest include INFO, isoc, rfc and
internet-drafts.

The Gopher server has been registered with the University of
Minnesota, and can be accessed by choosing the "Internet Society"
entry underneath the "North America / USA / General" listing.

================================================
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Dynamic WAIS Prototype Announcement
by Mike Schwartz
<[e-mail]>

Dynamic WAIS is a system that extends the WAIS (Wide Area Information
Service) paradigm to support information from remote search systems (as
opposed to the usual collection of static documents).  We have a
prototype that supports gateways from WAIS to Archie and to Netfind,
using the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol to seamlessly integrate
the information spaces.  Unlike menu-level gateways (such as the current
interim telnet interface from the Internet Gopher system to Netfind),
Dynamic WAIS uses the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol to
seamlessly integrate the information spaces.  This approach allows users
to access a great deal of diverse information without learning multiple
user interfaces.

The key idea behind the Dynamic WAIS gateways is the conceptual work of
constructing mappings between the WAIS search-and-retrieve operations,
and the underlying Archie and Netfind operations.  In the case of
Netfind, for example, when the Dynamic WAIS user requests a search using
the "dynamic-netfind.src" WAIS source, the search is translated to a
lookup in the Netfind seed database, to determine potential domains to
search.  The Netfind domain selection request is then mapped into a WAIS
database selection request.  Once the user selects one of the domains to
search, the WAIS retrieval phase is mapped into an actual domain search
in Netfind.

The actual implementation of Dynamic WAIS involves fairly
straightforward extensions to the standard WAIS code.  Whereas standard
WAIS has a search and a retrieval phase, with dynamic WAIS the retrieval
phase can trigger a remote search (which could cascade if the retrieval
for that search caused another search, although the current prototype
only goes one level deep).  The problem that arises is that the standard
WAIS client does not send the keywords to the server during the
retrieval phase.  The Dynamic WAIS client sends the keywords in both
phases, and also understands how to display the results of Dynamic
searches.

If you would like to learn more about Dynamic WAIS, you can obtain the
source to the Dynamic WAIS prototype via anonymous ftp from
ftp.cs.colorado.edu in /pub/cs/distribs/dynamicwais.  This directory
also contains WAIS ".src" files for the Dynamic WAIS gateways to Archie
and Netfind.  A paper on Dynamic WAIS is in preparation.

This WAIS server was created in January 1993 by Darren R. Hardy and
Michael F. Schwartz as part of the Networked Resource Discovery
Project.

================================================
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TCP/IP "Bake-Off" HELD TO ENSURE INTEROPERABILITY
- --First Test Meet Sees 13 Vendors Testing Protocol Suite Implementations--

Engineers from 14 companies gathered at North Andover, Massachusetts,
in February
for a multivendor Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol (TCP/IP) "Bake-Off".  The vendors attending the Bake-Off
exercised their implementations of the TCP/IP
protocol suite to test interoperability between products.

Participating in the week of testing were: BSDI, Data General Corporation,
Digital Equipment Corporation, Empirical Tools and Technologies, Inc.,
FTP Software, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company, InterCon Systems Corporation,
Lachman Technology, Inc., Mentat Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Novell, Inc.,
TGV, Inc., Tule Network Services, and Xyplex, Inc.

While there have been multivendor networks at trade shows such as UniForum,
the Federal Computer Conference and INTEROP for nearly 10 years now, as well
as groups who meet regularly to work with SNMP, NFS, X and similar standards,
there has been little cooperative testing of the underlying TCP/IP stacks and
their associated application-level protocol suites.  This appears in the
fact that there are some implementations currently available which
are unable to successfully negotiate even some of the more basic
communications options, or keep network links open when hardware or software
anomalies occur.

"Networking customers do - and should be able to - expect a wide range of
products to be able to interoperate", said one of the organizers of the
event.  "Participation in a testing event such as this demonstrates a
vendor's commitment to quality, and at the same time provides another
potent quality control function for networking consumers."  He went on to
say that "network vendors are presented with an unique paradox:  in order
to compete against each other, they have to work together - because any
networking product that cannot communicate with another networking product
rather rapidly ceases to have discernable practical utility."

The Bake-Off effort began when an open invitation to participate was given
at the November 1992 IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) meeting in
Washington D.C., the Bake-Off was founded on an example set by Jon Postel
of USC's Information Sciences Institute, one of the original TCP/IP
designers, almost 12 years ago.  While the recent testing took place in a
secure area, and actual test results will not be made public, some of the
tests designed and used by the participants will be made openly available to
members of the networking industry.

Since this was the first such event in so long a time, it was expected,
in part, to be a trial effort.  All participants felt that the exercise was
a success, and there are plans to hold another Bake-Off within the year.
In fact, several vendors have reported that improvements developed at the
Bake-Off would be included in future releases.

================================================
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Internet and the Handicapped

For many of us, the Internet has become an indispensible
part of our professional life and career activities.  For
other Internauts, it is somewhat more special.  The
following note was recently posted by David Richman
<[e-mail]> on the Shakespeare Electronic
Conference list:

  A query to anyone on this list associated with *Shakespeare Bulletin* or
  *Shakespeare Quarterly*.  Any chance of either of these periodicals becoming
  available electronically, perhaps through GOPHER or some other electronic
  service.  Being blind, I and my speech synthesizer take delight in online
  material.  I would be willing to pay up to twice the normal subscription
  rate for either of these journals in electronic form.  Thanks.

================================================
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The Secret Internet

As the Internet continues to scale exponentially worldwide, it is being constantly
featured in numerous publications.  One of the more unusual, however, was the
26 December issue of THE ECONOMIST.   An articled entitled  "THE GOOD
NETWORK GUIDE - Being one of us" ranked networking groups on several factors.
The Internet  made this noted list, but with rather curious attributes.


  The following are measured on a scale from 0 to 5, 0 = lowest, 5 = highest:
  P = Power
  S = Secrecy
  O = Organization
  B = Strength of Beliefs
  P = Peculiarity of rituals
  E = Exclusivity

  Conspiracy ("Network")                          P    S    O    B    P    E
  ---------------------------------------------  ---  ---  ---  ---  ---  ---
  Old Etonians                                    3    1    1    2    3    4
  Cambridge University Conservative Association   3    1    4    0    2    2
  Skull and Bones                                 2    4    2    0    5    5
  Inspection Generale de Finance                  5    2    5    3    1    5
  Doon School                                     4    1    2    3    1    4
  law school of Tokyo U.                          5    2    5    3    1    5
  Rhodes scholarship                              3    0    3    1    1    4
  Mont Pelerin Society                            2    3    3    5    2    3
  Committee to Defend the Workers (KOR)           4    3    3    4    1    4
  The Communist Party (XSU)                       4    5    2    1    1    3
  Broederbond                                     4    4    4    4    4    2
  Muslim Brotherhood                              2    3    4    5    3    1
  Opus Dei                                        2    4    4    5    5    1
  Freemasonry                                     3    4    4    3    5    2
  Trilateral Commission                           4    3    3    1    0    5
  USENET and Internet                             2    0    1    2    5    1
  Order of Illuminati                             5    5    5    5    5    5

================================================
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ISOC Nominations Committee Report

Six Trustee positions are to be determined in the 1993 elections. Four
of these positions  are Trustee  positions created  in  1993, and  two
positions are the result  of the  standing down of Trustees  Harms and
Aiso.

Selected Candidates
---------------------

The  following  individuals have  been  selected  by  the  Nominations
Committee as candidates in the 1993 election:

        Peter Bakonyi           [e-mail]
        Xavier Baquero          [e-mail]
        Scott Bradner           [e-mail]
        Nevil Brownlee          [e-mail]
        Brian Carpenter         [e-mail]
        Susan Estrada           [e-mail]
        Dave Farber             [e-mail]
        Howard Funk             [e-mail]
        Haruhisa Ishida         [e-mail]
        Gary Malkin             [e-mail]
        Jean Polly              [e-mail]
        Dave Sincoskie          [e-mail]


Petition Candidates
---------------------

The following individuals have submitted membership petitions signed by
a minimum of 50 ISOC individual members by the nominated due date:

        Jon Postel              [e-mail]
        Yakov Rekhter           [e-mail]


Candidate Details
-------------------

Submitted  details  of  all  listed candidates  are  held on  the host
aarnet.edu.au in the directory /pub/isoc/candidates

Biographies of all candidates are also available in the Internet
Society Gopher server (ietf.cnri.reston.va.us) and also in the
ftp/isoc/elections anonymous FTP directory on the same machine.

The Internet Society Nominations Committee:
        G. Huston (Chair)
        R. Blokzijl
        I. Fuchs
        T. Kalin
        C. Partridge
        H. Tokuda

 ================================================
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Transition to the New INTERNIC Team

Please note, after 31 MARCH, operations of the NSF Network Service
Center (NNSC) will be discontinued.  The services formerly provided
by the NNSC will be transferred to a new Network Information Services
Management team, collectively known as the INTERNIC (the Internet
Network Information Center).

As a result of a competitive solicitation, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) has awarded new contracts for NSFNET/NREN services:

   *  Network Solutions (NSI), has provided registration for the
      NSFNET since January 1992, and will continue to perform
      these services.

   *  AT&T will provide expanded directory and database services.

   *  General Atomics, which now operates CERFnet and the San
      Diego Supercomputer Center, will provide a Help Desk and
      general information services.

The new INTERNIC phone number is 800-444-4345 and email is
[e-mail].  The phone number is scheduled to be in
service on 1 April  1993 with a voice menu:

        1 - REGISTRATION SERVICES               Direct dial: 703-742-4757
                Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI)   Email: [e-mail]
                Herndon, VA

        2 - DIRECTORY AND DATABASE SERVICES     Direct dial: 908-668-6587
                AT&T                            FAX: [phone]
                5000 Handley Road, Room 2F25    Email: [e-mail]
                South Plainfield, NJ 07080

        3 - INFORMATION SERVICES                Direct dial: 619-455-4600
                General Atomics                 Email: [e-mail]
                San Diego, CA

        4 - TO SPEAK WITH A RECEPTIONIST

After April 1, the resource-guide and policies-procedures online files
will be made available through AT&T/INTERNIC, as will the shadow
copies of RFCs, internet-drafts, ietf, iesg, and isoc.  The NNSC
Info-Server will no longer be available, but the INTERNIC hosts will
provide email servers.  The nnsc.nsf.net will announce details as they
become available.

A longer version of this announcement is in /nsfnet/transition
in the anonymous ftp directory on nnsc.nsf.net, or send email to
[e-mail] with the these lines in the text field:
        request: nsfnet
        topic: transition

 ================================================
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INET'93 - Towards a Global Community
International Networking Conference
Internet Society
San Francisco, CA  17-20 August 1993

The International Networking Conference is the annual conference of the
Internet Society, a new professional society serving the Internet
community. Following the very successful INET'92, INET'93 will be held
on 17-20 August 1993 in San Francisco.  Focusing on worldwide issues of
research and academic networking, the goal of INET'93 is to bring
together individuals from university, industry and government who are
involved with planning, developing, implementing, managing and funding
national, regional and international research, academic, and commercial
networks.

The conference
agenda will include plans and status reports on research and academic
networks throughout the world.  Major topics include:

  Network Technology: Advances in the Network Technology Base

  Network Engineering: Building the Global Infrastructure

  Application Technology: Enabling Technologies for Distributed
  Applications

  User Applications: Support for International Communities of Interest

  Regional Issues: Networking Around the Globe

  Policy Issues: Governance, Management, and Financing of International
  Networks

The conference will be held immediately preceding Fall Interop '93,
the leading trade show for Internet technologies. This will make
possible attending both events as well as tutorials given as part of
Interop '93.


Workshop for Developing Countries

A workshop designed to assist developing countries in their installation
and use of networking technology and services is being organized and will
take place during the week before the conference in the San Francisco Bay
Area.

Conference Chair:          Eric Benhamou, President, 3Com

To be added to the conference mailing list or for other requests, send
mail, fax or E-mail to:

USRA
ATTN: INET'93
625 Ellis Street, Suite 205
Mountain View, CA  94043
USA
tel: [phone]
fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
 the INTERNIC (the Internet
Network Information Center).