![[TEN-34 logo]](/ten-34/ten-34-small.GIF)
Editor: Cathrin.Stover@dante.org.uk
With the start of 1998 TEN-34 continues to provide a high quality backbone service to the European Research Community. An additional 10 Mbps ATM link between Frankfurt and Vienna came into operation on 9 February 1998. A second router in Germany was added to the TEN-34 network and the circuits in Frankfurt were rearranged. Portugal will join the TEN-34 network in March with a 10 Mbps satellite link to Geneva and will thus complete the TEN-34 network topology.
As in the previous months, access port and line availability have again been greater than 99%, with the exception of connectivity between Italy and Greece where a damaged sea cable led to an unexpected major outage at the beginning of January 1998.
The IP subnetwork of TEN-34 managed by Unisource is currently undergoing major improvements. Unisource is migrating from IP to ATM VP on certain links in their network. The start was made on 1 February with an additional link in the Unisource network between Stockholm and Geneva at 34 Mbps. An additional 34 Mbps ATM link between London and Amsterdam will become operational on 9 March. This will be followed in mid-March by upgrades on the connectivity between Amsterdam and Geneva as well as between Stockholm and Amsterdam. The Stockholm-London link will be upgraded to 34 Mbps in April.
On February 13, DANTE, acting on behalf of the QUANTUM consortium received 16 responses to the Invitation to Tender issued on 23 December 1997. These responses are being evaluated under strict confidentiality by a team made up of DANTE staff and four technical experts from some of the National Research Networks. The responses cover a range of offers from point-to-point connectivity to complete subnetworks and it is expected that a much more cost effective network can be built from these offers.
![[TF-TEN logo]](/ten-34/tf-ten/tf-ten.GIF)
The Task Force TEN has made further progress in the testing of advanced ATM techniques. The highlight of the last two months was the testing of CISCO TAG switching, a technology allowing efficient switching of IP traffic, especially over ATM networks. This experiment was supported by Cisco who made some equipment available for the experiment.
Another experiment focuses on ATM routing with ATM Forum PNNI. For this experiment a set of switches all over Europe has been interconnected using this ATM routing protocol. The results of the first phase of the tests are encouraging, although the full PNNI standard does not seem to be supported by current switches.
More tests are to be carried out in the near future on point-to-multipoint signalling, which will be required for efficient videoconferencing directly on ATM. There seem to be significant shortcomings in existing switches which limit the usefulness of this technique to date. The Task Force will also be looking into testing address translation, NHRP and other topics in the near future.
More information can be found on the TF-TEN homepage or contact Michael.Behringer@dante.org.uk
The second portion of DANTE's US service became operational on 21 January 1998. This consists of a line from TeleGlobe's PoP in New York to the MCI's Perriman facility, where interconnection with ESnet was established on 23 January 1998. Interconnection with NASA is expected to follow shortly.
Since November 1997 DANTE's US service is providing access to the US and the wider Internet to the NRNs of the Czech Republic (CESnet), Greece (GRnet), Hungary (Hungarnet) and Italy (GARR).
The Transatlantic line has filled up rapidly and is loaded up to 100% during working hours. Inevitably, packet loss occurs during the busiest times.
DANTE in collaboration with the European NRNs is currently reorganising the topology of the European MBONE. MBONE is the part of the Internet that supports multicast, i.e. one-to-many. The reorganisation became necessary as in the existing topology some NRNs use their own access links for MBONE feeds several times resulting in actual costs for the NRNs. In other cases backbone links are used more than once resulting in waste of backbone bandwidth.
DANTE is therefore currently implementing a new topology which introduces MBONE distribution within the network and will make scalable and general solutions possible. The topology of the European MBONE will be modified to match the physical topology of the TEN-34 network. Workstations in the PoPs will run mrouted and tunnels between these and the NRNs will be set up. The advantage of distributing MBONE within the network is that backbone and access links will only be used once per each MBONE feed.
By mid-March all NRNs will have migrated to the new topology. More information can be found here.
![[EuroCERT logo]](/pubs/EuroCERT.GIF)
EuroCERT, the European Incident Response Coordination Service, operated under a contract between TERENA and the DANTE/UKERNA partnership has been in operation for 10 months of the original 12 months contract. In January 1998 UKERNA presented a proposal to TERENA for an Incident Coordination service to start in May 1998. This proposal was accepted in principle and they are currently in the process of finalising the details of the contract with TERENA. DANTE will still retain a presence in the project after the completion of the initial contract period at the end of April 1998, with the prospect of more active involvement at a later stage.
Currently the following eleven organisations are contributing to EuroCERT: ACONET (Austria), ARNES (Slovenia), CNUCE (Italy), DFN (Germany), NORDUnet (Nordic countries), RedIRIS (Spain), Renater (France), SURFnet (Netherlands), SWITCH (Switzerland), UKERNA (United Kingdom) and UNINETT (Norway).
EuroCERT held an open meeting co-located with the FIRST (Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams) technical colloquium in Milan, Italy on 12 January 1998. This meeting was very successful with thirty-six people attending from locations around Europe and North America. The occasion was used as an opportunity for IRTs to share information and to discuss how EuroCERT should move forward towards Incident Coordination. The minutes and copies of the presentations are available from the EuroCERT web site.
A small core group of NameFLOW customers are currently working with DANTE to develop a project plan for an LDAPv3 based directory pilot which will be run during the course of 1998. The intention is that providing the Pilot proves successful, the NameFLOW directory infrastructure will migrate to being LDAP based.
The strategy to move towards LDAP was decided after the second X.500(93) interoperability test campaign in May/June 1997 failed to provide the evidence that X.500(93) directory products provide the functionality and degree of interoperability at a price NameFLOW customers found acceptable.
After one and a half years with DANTE, Christoph Graf returned to his home country Switzerland at the end of January 1998. Christoph now works for Sun Microsystems in Zurich.
Liz Birchby left DANTE in mid-February. Liz has joined Cambridge Consultants in Cambridge.
Edna Hussey joins DANTE as Secretary/Administrator on Monday 9 March 1998 as replacement for Jane Beavis who will be going on maternity leave at the end of March. At present Edna is Personal Assistant to one of the Senior Partners at McKenzie Bell Solicitors in Sunderland.
DANTE is offering challenging jobs in the areas of Application and Network Engineers. For more information, please visit our jobs' page.