CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Guy Almes/Rice TEWG Minutes The TEWG met for a single session on Wednesday morning, August 1st. Scott Brim, Chair of TEWG, was unable to attend and asked Guy Almes to chair the session in his place. The session focused on sharing information about three increasingly important areas of Internet topology: Europe, the Pacific, and the new Army Supercomputer Network (ASnet). Rudiger Volk, of the University of Dortmund and a participant in RIPE, led a presentation and discussion of connectivity both between Europe and North America and within Europe. Olivier Martin of CERN also contributed to the discussion. Rudiger first focused on trans-Atlantic connectivity. Among the most important links are the following: o The 64kb/s line from EUnet at CWI in Amsterdam to the UUnet site in Virginia. This serves the EUnet community directly and serves as a backup for other nets, e.g., NORDUnet. o The 64kb/s line from NORDUnet in Stockholm to the NSFnet site at JvNC. This serves the NORDUnet community directly. o The T1 line from CERN in Geneva to the NSFnet site at Cornell University. This serves the EASInet community directly. o The 56kb/s line from INRIA near Nice to Princeton University. This serves users within France directly. o The 56kb/s satellite line from DFN/WIN in Garching to the ESnet site at Fermilab. This serves the DFN/WIN community within Germany directly. o The 9.6kb/s line from Karlsruhe to NYSERnet serves another community within Germany. Further, there is a planned upgrade of the DFN-to-ESnet line to use one of the two `fat pipes'. Rudiger and Olivier mentioned two problems that lead to asymmetric and sub-optimal routes to Europe: o The heavy use of default routes within some parts of Europe often result in asymmetric routes in which packets go from North America to Europe via some explicit route, while return packets use a default path. Increased deployment of dynamic routing within Europe should improve this situation. 1 o The use of MX records for some European sites cause very suboptimal routes to be taken in some cases. RIPE is working with others to help solve these problems. There was a brief discussion of the situation in Britain. As a general rule, IP traffic from the outside world enters the UK via an application-level gateway in London, and is transmitted via JAnet using the Coloured Book protocols to individual campuses. There are several exceptions to this that we discussed. First, the University of Kent at Canterbury is on EUnet, and thus connects to Europe and thence to North America via CWI in Amsterdam. Also Milo Medin reported that, as part of the `fat pipe' to London, some British sites will be served by JAnet using `IP-over-X.25' techniques; this should be an improvement over the current use of the JAnet application-level gateway. Rudiger closed with some thoughts on a possible outline for an intra-European backbone. He noted that currently, the three most important trans-Atlantic lines are those at: o CWI in Amsterdam, o The NORDUnet hub in Stockholm, and o CERN in Geneva. There are plans upderway to upgrade the bandwidth of lines from Stockholm to Amsterdam and from Amsterdam to Geneva. Milo Medin, of NASA, reported on a recent meeting of PACCOM, which coordinates the Internet within the Pacific Rim. At the present, there is a 512kb/s terrestrial line from NASA/Ames to Hawaii, which serves Hawaii and the following other sites: o Japan via four 64kb/s terrestrial circuits. There is some work to combine these to a single 256kb/s circuit. o Australia via a 56kb/s satellite circuit. There is some work on increasing the bandwidth of this circuit within the year. Unfortunately, it will be quite some time until the circuit can be converted from satellite to terrestrial. o New Zealand via a 14kb/s analog circuit. There is some work on using better modems, and possibly real-time compression boxes, to increase the effective bandwidth of this line. o Korea via a 56kb/s circuit. Among the coming developments are the following: o The possibility of a 64kb/s line from Japan to Europe. This would 2 complicate routing within the Pacific. The effective use of the current low-speed lines is eased by the ability to use default routing heavily from Pacific Rim countries to Hawaii. o Discussions of adding Singapore and Taiwan. In response to a question about networking to sites in Antarctica, Milo expressed regret over current technical problems that prevent the placement of a geostationary satellite there. More seriously, he mentioned that work is being done on networking to Antarctica. Bob Reschly, of ASnet and BRL, reported on the ongoing deployment of ASnet, which serves the Army supercomputer centers and other Army labs. The initial topology is a mixed T1/56kb/s topology centered at BRL. ASnet is 138.18. Connectivity to NSFnet is primarily through the ASnet site at the Minnesota Supercomputer Center via MRnet and CICnet. A secondary connection from the ASnet site in Vicksburg to the SURAnet site at Jackson, Mississippi and through SURAnet is planned. Several ASnet sites are also on MILnet, and a subset of these will be used to route traffic between ASnet and MILnet. An ASnet router at FIX-Ease would improve connectivity both to MILnet, to NSFnet, and to other parts of the Internet. One interesting technical aspect of ASnet is its planned use of crypto equipment on all serial lines. ASnet is openly connected to the rest of the Internet, and is to be used only for science/research uses within the Army. Attendees Guy Almes almes@rice.edu William Anderson wda@mitre-bedford.org Jeffrey Burgan jeff@nsipo.nasa.gov Eric Carroll eric@utcs.utoronto.ca Rob Coltun rcoltun@trantor.umd.edu Dennis Ferguson dennis@gw.ccie.utoronto.ca Dale Finkelson dmf@westie.unl.edu Vince Fuller fuller@jessica.stanford.edu Hellmut Golde golde@june.cs.washington.edu Michael Grobe grobe@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu Phill Gross pgross@nri.reston.va.us Michael Hrybyk mwh@educom.edu Steven Hubert hubert@cac.washington.edu Dan Jordt danj@cac.washington.edu Kathy Kerby kkerby@bbn.com Dan Long long@bbn.com Olivier Martin martin@cearn.cern.ch 3 Matt Mathis mathis@pele.psc.edu Milo Medin medin@nsipo.nasa.gov Paul Mockapetris pvm@isi.edu Philippe Park ppark@bbn.com Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil Ron Roberts roberts@jessica.stanford.edu Ken Stetten kstetten@nrao.edu Roxanne Streeter streeter@nsipo.arc.nasa.gov Rudiger Volk rv@informatik.uni-dortmund.de Tom VonDeak tvondeak@nasamail.nasa.gov Carol Ward cward@spot.colorado.edu John Wieronski john@osc.edu Dan Wintringham danw@igloo.osc.edu Robert Woodburn woody@saic.com 4