[9075] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Network Operations and Engineering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ittai Hershman)
Wed Dec 15 21:12:22 1993
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 21:07:01 EST
From: Ittai Hershman <ittai@ans.net>
To: com-priv@psi.com
For those com-priv'ers that are interested in operations and engineering
of the Internet in general, and the NSFNET Backbone Service in
particular, the following will be of interest. I apologize in advance
for the length of this message.
The Internet community has developed organizational structures to
support it. One such structure is the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF); there is no membership fee and the IETF is open to all
interested parties. In addition to setting standards for the Internet
suite of protocols (more commonly known as TCP/IP), the IETF is also the
primary forum for network service providers to cooperate on Internet
operations issues. The IETF meets in-person three times a year, and ANS
always participates. The IETF also "meets" online and again ANS
participates very heavily both in standards activities and operations
activities.
At each IETF, ANS publically presents an update on the operational
status of the network and where it is heading. Additionally, each month
ANS writes a detailed engineering report which is published in the
Internet Monthly Report (IMR). As it happens, the November IMR was just
published today and so I have attached the first 12 pages for your
reading pleasure. Details on how to get more info on the IETF and IMR
are provided in the introductory section. Additionally, the ANSNet
Engineering Report excerpts are available by anonymous FTP from
ftp.ans.net:pub/info/engineering-reports:backbone-eng-rpt.yy-mm
(starting with backbone-eng-rpt.91-10).
Happy reading,
-Ittai
---------------
>From: Ann Cooper <cooper@isi.edu>
Subject: Internet Monthly Report - November 1993
Cc: ietf@CNRI.Reston.VA.US
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 18:41:33 GMT
November 1993
INTERNET MONTHLY REPORTS
------------------------
The purpose of these reports is to communicate to the Internet Research
Group the accomplishments, milestones reached, or problems discovered by
the participating organizations.
This report is for Internet information purposes only, and is not
to be quoted in other publications without permission from the
submitter.
Each organization is expected to submit a 1/2 page report on the first
business day of the month describing the previous month's activities.
These reports should be submitted via network mail to:
Ann Westine Cooper (Cooper@ISI.EDU)
NSF Regional reports - To obtain the procedure describing how to
submit information for the Internet Monthly Report, send an email
message to mailserv@is.internic.net and put "send imr-procedure" in
the body of the message (add only that one line; do not put a
signature).
Requests to be added or deleted from the Internet Monthly report list
should be sent to "imr-request@isi.edu".
Details on obtaining the current IMR, or back issues, via FTP or
EMAIL may be obtained by sending an EMAIL message to "rfc-
info@ISI.EDU" with the message body "help: ways_to_get_imrs". For
example:
To: rfc-info@ISI.EDU
Subject: getting imrs
help: ways_to_get_imrs
Cooper [Page 1]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 3
Internet Projects
ANSNET/NSFNET BACKBONE ENGINEERING . . . . . . . . . . . page 7
BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN, INC., . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 12
CICNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 14
INTERNIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 15
ISI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 19
MERIT/MICHNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 23
MERIT/NSFNET INFORMATION SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . page 25
MRNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 28
NORTHWESTNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29
UCL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 30
USER SERVICES REPORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 32
CALENDAR OF EVENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 45
Rare List of Meetings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 46
Cooper [Page 2]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
INTERNET ENGINEERING REPORTS
----------------------------
IETF MONTHLY REPORT for November, 1993
1. The 28th meeting of the IETF was held in Houston, Texas the
first week of November, and was very well attended by over 635
registered attendees. The final numbers are not in yet, but it
appears that the Houston meeting will be in the top three based
on attendance. This meeting was hosted by the folks at SESQUINET
and Rice University.
At the open plenary on Thursday, there was a consensus that
beginning with the Seattle IETF meeting, the IETF Secretariat
will be publishing the proceedings electronically. Details on
this will be provided, but are still being worked out by the
Secretariat.
2. The next meeting of the IETF will be held in Seattle, Washington
from March 29 (registration reception on the 28th) through April
1, 1994. This meeting is being hosted by NorthWestNet. Following
the March 1994 meeting, the IETF will be in Toronto Canada from
July 25-29 with the registration reception being held on Sunday,
July 24.
It looks like the IETF will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in
the fall... no dates have been set, but the meeting will
probably be in the first two weeks of November. Once the final
arrangements have been made, the normal notifications will be
sent to the IETF Announcement list.
Remember that information on future IETF meetings can be always
be found in the file 0mtg-sites.txt which is located on the IETF
shadow directories.
3. The IESG approved or recommended the following seven Protocol
Actions during the month of November, 1993:
o Guidelines for Running OSPF Over Frame Relay Networks be
published as an Informational RFC.
o Use of ISO CLNP in TUBA Environments be published as an
Experimental Protocol.
Cooper [Page 3]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
o Telnet Environment Option as a Proposed Standard.
o Telnet Environment Option Interoperability Issues be
published as an Informational RFC.
o Representing IP Information in the X.500 Directory be
published as an Experimental protocol.
o DSA Metrics be published as an Informational RFC.
o Charting Networks in the X.500 Directory be published as an
Experimental protocol.
4. The IESG issued three Last Calls to the IETF during the month
of November, 1993:
o The OSPF NSSA Option <draft-ietf-ospf-nssa-option-01> being
considered as a Proposed Standard
o DECnet Phase IV MIB Extensions
<draft-ietf-decnetiv-mibext-03> being considered as a Draft
Standard
o TN3270 Current Practices
<draft-ietf-tn3270e-current-pract-03.txt> being considered
as an Informational Document
5. A total of 27 Internet-Draft actions were taken during the month
of November, 1993:
(Revised draft (o), New Draft (+) )
(telnet) o Telnet Authentication: Kerberos Version 5
<draft-ietf-telnet-authker-v5-01.txt>
(tuba) o Use of ISO CLNP in TUBA Environments
<draft-ietf-tuba-clnp-05.txt>
(bgp) o Application of the Border Gateway Protocol in the
Internet <draft-ietf-bgp-application-03.txt>
(ospf) o OSPF Version 2 Management Information Base
<draft-ietf-ospf-mib-01.txt>
(x400ops) o Using the Internet DNS to maintain RFC1327 Address
Mapping Tables
<draft-ietf-x400ops-dnsx400maps-03.txt>
Cooper [Page 4]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
(ipidrp) o IDRP for SIP <draft-ietf-ipidrp-sip-01.txt>
(iplpdn) o Management Information Base for Frame Relay DTEs
<draft-ietf-iplpdn-frmib-dte-01.txt>
(cat) o FTP Security Extensions
<draft-ietf-cat-ftpsec-04.txt>
(frnetmib) o Definitions of Managed Objects for Frame Relay
Service <draft-ietf-frnetmib-fr-05.txt>
(ifmib) o Evolution of the Interfaces Group of MIB-II
<draft-ietf-ifmib-evolution-06.txt>
(atm) o Default IP MTU for use over ATM AAL5
<draft-ietf-atm-mtu-05.txt>
(madman) o Directory Monitoring MIB
<draft-ietf-madman-dsa-mib-07.txt>
(pppext) o PPP Bridging Control Protocol (BCP)
<draft-ietf-pppext-for-bridging-02.txt>
(thinosi) o Octet sequences for upper-layer OSI to support basic
communications applications
<draft-ietf-thinosi-cookbook-02.txt>
(tn3270e) o TN3270 Current Practices
<draft-ietf-tn3270e-current-pract-03.txt>
(pppext) o The PPP Multilink Control Protocol (MCP)
<draft-ietf-pppext-multilink-04.txt>
(none) o An Extensible Message Format for Delivery Status
Notifications <draft-vaudreuil-mime-delivery-01.txt>
(pppext) o The PPP NetBIOS Frames Control Protocol (NBFCP)
<draft-ietf-pppext-netbios-fcp-02.txt>
(none) o SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large
and Binary MIME Messages
<draft-vaudreuil-smtp-binary-02.txt>
(none) o Text/Signature <draft-vaudreuil-mime-sig-01.txt>
(none) + HTML+ (Hypertext markup format)
<draft-raggett-www-html-00.txt, .ps>
(none) + SNMP Mid-Level-Manager MIB
<draft-levi-snmp-mid-level-mgr-00.txt>
(none) + SNMP Script Language
<draft-levi-snmp-script-language-00.txt>
(bgp) + BGP-4 protocol document roadmap and implementation
experience <draft-ietf-bgp-bgp4-implement-00.txt>
(iiir) + Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) A Stateless
Search, Retrieve and Manipulation Protocol
<draft-ietf-iiir-http-00.txt, .ps>
(sip) + IPAE: The SIPP Interoperability and Transition
Mechanism <draft-ietf-sip-ipae-transition-00.txt>
(thinosi) + Use of upper-layer OSI protocols to support basic
communications applications
<draft-ietf-thinosi-profile-00.txt>
Cooper [Page 5]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
6. There were 3 RFC's published during the month of November, 1993:
RFC St WG Title
------- -- -------- -------------------------------------
RFC1544 PS (822ext) The Content-MD5 Header Field
RFC1545 E (none) FTP Operation Over Big Address Records
(FOOBAR)
RFC1546 I (none) Host Anycasting Service
St(atus): ( S) Internet Standard
(PS) Proposed Standard
(DS) Draft Standard
( E) Experimental
( I) Informational
Steve Coya (scoya@cnri.reston.va.us)
Cooper [Page 6]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
INTERNET PROJECTS
-----------------
ANSNET/NSFNET BACKBONE ENGINEERING
----------------------------------
Network Status Summary
======================
Four out of six steps comprising the T3 network upgrade (Phase-5)
have been completed. The remaining two steps required to finish
the T3 hardware upgrade to the ANSnet will be completed in
December.
New Rcp_routed software was released on the T3 network to address
performance improvements. Gated software including support for
BGP4 was released to Cornell for a future public release. ANSnet
test routers are peering with other networks on the BGP4 public
test network.
October Backbone Traffic and Routing Statistics
===============================================
The total inbound packet count for the T3 network (measured using
SNMP interface counters) was 44,687,182,575 on T3 ENSS interfaces,
up 2.3% from October. The total packet count into the network
including all ENSS serial interfaces was 52,859,569,704 up 3.5%
from October. The maximum number of destinations announced to the
T3 network during November was 13,886.
T3 Network Upgrade Progress/Status
==================================
During November (and the first week in December) we successfully
completed four of the six steps that comprise a major upgrade to
the T3 network (called "Phase-5 upgrade"). The major changes that
will result from this upgrade are:
o Upgrade of all DS3/HSSI router serial interface adapters (T3
CNSS and ENSS) to support full DS3 bandwidth. The router
adapter bus interface cards will also be upgraded to double
the packet switching rates per interface.
o The architecture for interconnection among CNSS routers at
each MCI POP location will be upgraded from point-to-point
links to a common FDDI ring.
Cooper [Page 7]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
o The T3 DSUs on each DS3 interface will be replaced with a T3
bandwidth manager (T3Plus BMX45) to accommodate each T3
CNSS-CNSS circuit, and a Larscom Access-T45 DSU on each end
of a T3 ENSS-CNSS circuit.
o New system software and microcode has been installed to
support the increased adapter performance. Routing software
has already been deployed to support the new CNSS
architecture.
With the completion of 4 of the 6 deployment steps so far, we now
have 10 backbone T3 links and 13 customer attachments running at
full T3:
Seattle - Denver Backbone Link
Seattle - San Francisco Backbone Link
San Francisco - Chicago Backbone Link
San Francisco - Los Angeles Backbone Link
Los-Angeles - Albuquerque Backbone Link
Albuquerque - Houston Backbone Link
Houston - Atlanta Backbone Link
Atlanta - Greensboro Backbone Link
Houston - St. Louis Backbone Link
St. Louis - Chicago Backbone Link
ENSS128 at Palo Alto (BARRnet, Stanford University)
ENSS129 at Champaign (UIUC, CICnet)
ENSS130 at Argonne (Argonne National Lab, CICNet)
ENSS135 at San Diego (CERFnet, SDSC, etc.)
ENSS138 at Atlanta (Georgia Tech, SURAnet)
ENSS139 at Houston (Sesquinet, Rice University)
ENSS140 at Lincoln (MIDnet, Westnet, etc.)
ENSS141 at Boulder (Westnet, NCAR, U of Colorado, etc.)
ENSS142 at Salt Lake City (WestNet, U of Utah, etc.)
ENSS143 at Seattle (NorthWestNet, U of Washington, etc.)
ENSS144 at Moffett Field (FIX-West)
ENSS172 at Albuquerque (Phillips Laboratory)
ENSS179 at Albuquerque (Sandia National Labs)
Additionally, ENSS200 provided full T3 connectivity to the
Supercomputing '93 conference in Portland and the Radiological
Society of North America (RSNA) conference in Chicago during
November. The remaining steps are scheduled for December 11th and
18th, at which point the Phase 5 upgrade will have been completed:
Step Date Node Location Facility to be Upgraded
-------------------------------------------------------
5 12/11/93 E131 Cleveland Ann Arbor ENSS and Cleveland POP
E132 Cleveland Pittsburgh ENSS and Cleveland POP
Cooper [Page 8]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
E137 New York Princeton ENSS and New York POP
---- Chicago 3rd visit for Chicago-Cleveland
link upgrade
---- Denver 2nd visit for Denver-St. Louis
link upgrade
---- St. Louis 2nd visit for Denver-St. Louis
link upgrade
6 12/18/93 E133 Hartford Ithaca ENSS and Hartford POP
E134 Hartford Boston ENSS and Hartford POP
E136 Wash D.C. College Park ENSS and Wash D.C.POP
E145 Wash D.C. FIX-East ENSS and Wash D.C. POP
E146 Wash D.C. DARPA ENSS and Wash D.C. POP
---- Cleveland 2nd visit for Cleveland-Hartford
link upgrade
---- Greensboro 2nd visit for Greensboro-D.C.
link upgrade
---- New York 2nd visit for NY-Hartford
link upgrade and for NY-D.C.
link upgrade
Rcp_routed Routing Software Changes
===================================
Rcp_routed maintenance releases were deployed in November. Early
in November, the "Improved Efficiency" version was released. A few
subsequent performance enhancements have been deployed on ENSS144,
ENSS145, and ENSS136 to address specific problems. A memory leak
has recently been identified and a fix will be deployed in early
December. Release notes are available for anonymous ftp at:
ftp.ans.net:/pub/info/t3-rcp_routed/Release-Notes. Recent changes
have been made to address the effects of high levels of external
route flap, both the effects on ANSnet and the effects on ANSnet
peer networks.
Routing Stability Measured on the T3 Network
============================================
Internal routing stability measurements are made by monitoring
short term disconnect times (disconnects of five minutes duration
or less). This is intended as a measure of stability rather than
complete connectivity. November stability dropped to levels
observed in July and August due to problems with rcp_routed.
Cooper [Page 9]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
MONTH overall excluding configs
------ ------- -----------------
January 99.1% 99.5%
February 99.0% 99.5%
March 97.5% 99.1%
April 96.1% 97.2%
May 97.4% 98.0%
June 95.5% 96.6%
July 97.3% 97.7%
August 97.5% 97.9%
September 98.1% 98.5%
October 98.0% 98.3%
November 97.2% xx.x%
The primary causes of instability during November were problems
with rcp_routed, and equipment problems associated with new
equipment deployed as part of the phase5 deployment. ENSS136 saw
almost 7 hours of instability mostly due to paging on the router as
a result of a memory leak. ENSS144 saw 2-1/2 hours of instability
due to inefficiency associated with building EGP packets of over
30KB for numerous EGP peer routers. E143 experienced just over 2
hour of instability due to equipment problems associated with the
phase5 hardware deployment. Other nodes experienced 30-90 minutes
of instability due to phase5 deployment. A few nodes continued to
have local power problems.
The number of nodes experiencing more than 30 minutes accumulated
has been significantly reduced. The vast majority of nodes had
less than 15 minutes of accumulated instability over the course of
the month. The breakdown by sites is as follows (these figures
include instabilities recorded during configuration runs):
MONTH >5 hr >2 hr > 1hr >30 min >15 min <= 15min
<98.7% <99.7% <99.87% <99.93% <99.97% >=99.97%
------------------------------------------------------------
January 0 0 1 8 19 55
February 0 0 1 24 19 41
March 0 4 18 23 23 22
April 2 2 3 13 12 57
May 0 4 33 32 15 5
June 3 21 35 18 12 3
July 0 12 28 44 6 1
August 1 5 28 21 17 15
September 1 38 25 10 4 13
October 0 3 3 10 25 50
November 1 2 15 25 24 26
Cooper [Page 10]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
There has been steady increase in the external route flap over the
course of the year. The measurement method is described in:
ftp.ans.net:/pub/info/routing-stats/ExternalRouteFlapReports
The number of times networks are announced as unreachable is
collected. The following represents the monthly totals in terms of
number of networks declared unreachable per hour.
January 844
February 876
March 1104
April 1038
May 1134
June 1560
July 1815
August 1874
September 2395
October 2272
November 2321
Plots of the internal routing stability, external peer session
stability and external route flap are available as the files:
ftp.ans.net:/pub/info/routing-stats/internal.ps
ftp.ans.net:/pub/info/routing-stats/external.ps
ftp.ans.net:/pub/info/routing-stats/flap.ps
Recent changes to rcp_routed have been designed to dampen route
flap by deferring sending BGP updates slightly. This also more
effectively packs routes into BGP updates. This work will be
transferred to into Gated. A document, soon to be submitted as an
internet draft, describing this work is available as:
ftp.ans.net:/pub/info/routing-stats/route-dampen.{txt,ps}
Gated BGP4/CIDR Deployment Update
=================================
During November, ANS connected to the public BGP4 testnet and
established external long-distance (non-tunneled) peer sessions
with Cisco peers in Sweden and Alternet. We also are peering with
unix/Gated routers at Cornell and on the ANS internal testnet. We
are importing full routes, and exporting all AS690 routes to the
public testnet in addition to our own internal testing.
Our current plan is to deploy Gated BGP4 code on AS1133 routers
(Ebone link between GIX and Geneva) by 15-December or sooner, and
Cooper [Page 11]
Internet Monthly Report November 1993
AS690 (ANSnet/NSFnet) routers by 15-January. We have released the
current snapshot of the BGP4 Gated code to Cornell and expect there
will eventually be a public alpha release of BGP4/Gated code from
them. We are working with Merit to gather information, and develop
CIDR-era routing plans for NSFnet peer networks.
Notable Outages in November '93
===============================
E138 (Atlanta) lost T3 connectivity due to circuit problems on
11/15
E136 (College Park) and E145 (Fix-East) suffered extended outages
due to power failure on 11/16
E135 (San Diego) suffered an extended outage due to site power
maintenance on 11/21
E141 (Boulder), E142 (Salt Lake) and E143 (Washington) underwent
Phase V upgrade on 11/06
E128 (Palo Alto), E130 (Argonne) and E144 (Fix West) underwent
Phase V upgrade on 11/13
E135 (San Diego) and E139 (Rice) underwent Phase V upgrade on 11/20
E129 (Champaign), E138 (Atlanta) and E140 (Lincoln) underwent Phase
V upgrade on 12/4
Jordan Becker <becker@ans.net>
[Rest of the IMR deleted: IH]
