The Works of DANTE

A bi-monthly electronic newsletter reporting on the activities of DANTE, the company that organises pan-European research network services for the European research community.

No.23, October 1997

TEN-34 PERFORMANCE VERY GOOD

TEN-34 continues to provide a high quality backbone service to the European Research Community. The upgraded 45 Mbps access port in Amsterdam for use by BELNET and SURFnet came into operation on 18 August 1997; a 10 Mbps connection from Slovenia came into service on 16 October. The planned connections to Luxembourg and Portugal are still awaiting finalisation of contract details.

The performance of TEN-34 in terms of availability has been very good. With one or two exceptions, access port availability and line availability has been greater than 99% in the past three months. Line loads on the FUDI part of the network are in the range 20-50% during the busiest periods except between Paris and UK which is now approaching 80% load. With these loads, however, packet loss is very low and TEN-34 adds very little performance overhead to end-to-end connections between end users.

The programme of installing workstations in PoPs on the FUDI side of the network is in progress. The CISCO router software has been upgraded with the capability to run NETflow software; automatic data collection and analysis procedures have been set up and are currently being validated. The accuracy of the analysis is still being checked but it should be possible to provide more detailed information on traffic flows to the participating NRNs within a few weeks.

TEN-34 USER SURVEY

DANTE is currently preparing a TEN-34 user group survey to be carried out in November 1997. The survey will be based on addressing four different clusters of TEN-34 users. The first cluster is made up of those users who use TEN-34 to support research in their own specialist "non-Telematics" fields. Secondly there are those groups who use the European network as a platform for their own Research and Development activities in Telematics. The third cluster is formed by a number of European sites who have a significant interest in international an particularly pan- European connectivity. The fourth group is made up of individual general purpose research users, who may use TEN-34 for a variety of purposes such as e-mail, web access, multicast reception, etc.

Electronic questionnaires have been sent out in the past week , inquiring about experiences made with TEN-34 relating to pan-European communication. The questionnaire also contains a section asking about future network performance requirements and application needs.

If you would like to participate in the survey, you can find the questionnaire here.

NEW DANTE PoP IN THE US

DANTE has placed a contract for a transatlantic service consisting of a 34 Mbps link from TEN-34 in Frankfurt to New York (upgradeable to 45 Mbps), a DANTE PoP in New York, an interconnection to Teleglobe's Internet service, and a 45 Mbps link from New York to the MCI location at Perryman (just outside Washington, D.C.) where a second PoP has been established.

MCI/Perryman is the location where DFN and CERN already terminate their transatlantic connections and is also the location of nodes of ESnet, the NASA network and vBNS. In addition to connections to the commercial Internet in the US, this configuration will allow DANTE to provide direct connections to the US research networks. Interconnection agreements have already been established with ESnet and NASA; a proposal to interconnect to vBNS was included in DANTE's response to the recent NSF Solicitation for intercontinental links from the US.

DANTE will initially provide services to the national networks in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary and Italy. Discussions are also being held with other national networks concerning the use of DANTE PoPs in combination with transatlantic links that they procure themselves. This will allow optimisation of traffic flows to the various network services in the US. The DANTE US service is expected to start at the end of October.

EUROCERT PLAN FOR INCIDENT COORDINATION

EuroCERT, the European Incident Response Coordination Service, operated under a contract between TERENA and the DANTE/UKERNA partnership has been in operation for 6 months and is now producing plans to move to a live incident coordination service. The EuroCERT team is preparing a specification which when finalised will be used to move the service from being primarily an information resource to actively providing security incident coordination for European Incident Response Teams (IRTs).

Currently nine organisations are contributing financially to the pilot: ARNES (Slovenia), CNUCE (Italy), DFN (Germany), NORDUnet (Nordic countries), RedIRIS (Spain), SURFnet (Netherlands), SWITCH (Switzerland), UKERNA (United Kingdom) and UNINETT (Norway). ACONET (Austria) will join imminently with several others expected soon. Contributors will receive a priority service when incident coordination commences. EuroCERT will move to a more complete incident coordination service as more contributors become involved.

EuroCERT is holding an open meeting co-located with the FIRST (Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams) technical colloquium in Milano, Italy on 12 January 1998. This meeting is primarily aimed at European IRTs, but is open to all. The agenda will include presentations by EuroCERT, discussions and presentations on Incident response and a PGP signing party. Further information is available from the EuroCERT web site.

DANTE AT EITC 1997

DANTE will be exhibiting at the European IT Conference & Exhibition in Brussels Congress Centre from 24-26 November 1997. Through a connection into TEN-34 we will not only be able to demonstrate the day-to-day usage of the network, but will also be able to set up mulimedia communications sessions with remote sites across Europe.

Additionally, we will run an application which will show how the network is laid out, how countries are connected and how data travel over the network. We will provide links to, and information about the National Research Networks connected to TEN-34. Experiments with Advanced ATM Backbone Services in a pan-European context and their results will also be included in the TEN-34 presentation at EITC in Brussels.

LEAVING DANTE

After two and a half years with DANTE, Steven Bakker will return to his home country the Netherlands on 1 November 1997 to work for AT&T in Amsterdam.

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