Editor: Marine Chartois
The lower than usual figure for the average availability in January is mainly the result of two major interruptions: the Polish network PSNC suffered a 154-hours-long loss of connectivity, due to an SDH problem in Germany, which brought down their global access connectivity for the month to a mere 79.49%. The Portuguese network RCCN also suffered from a faulty card on their local access router, which brought their connectivity to the backbone network down for over 50 hours, resulting in an availability for January of 92.80%.
DANTE is planning to upgrade the connections to Germany and the Netherlands to 310 Mbps on 1 April 2000. March should also see the implementation of a new line operating at 155 Mbps between Austria and Switzerland, and an upgrade of the link between Hungary and Austria to 155 Mbps is planned for 1 April 2000.
The connectivity to Abilene was upgraded to 100 Mbps in the last week of February, allowing better performance for NRNs using this interconnection.
PSNC, the Polish network, and HEANET, the Irish NRN, have seen their connectivity to the US upgraded respectively from 14 Mbps to 24 Mbps, and from 23 Mbps to 43 Mbps.
Your input would help us to evaluate the current service, as well as provide us with an insight into what you, as the user, expects from future network developments. As such, your participation to this survey would be greatly appreciated.
Please look at this survey form, the text of which can be found on the DANTE website (http://www.dante.net/ten-155/IPquestionnaire.html), and send us your responses, which should only take a few minutes.
Please note that all inquiries regarding the TEN-155 MBS should now be addressed to Tim Streater.
The central ring of the network, linking Paris, London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt will be extended to Brussels, and its capacity increased from 155 Mbps to 622 Mbps. The planned service date for this 5-city ring is 1 July 2000.
DANTE also plans to upgrade the capacity to Stockholm, Geneva and Milan. In each case, the existing "dual links", ie. Two 155 Mbps circuits to two other cities on the network, will be duplicated, giving a total circuit capacity of 622 Mbps to/from each location.
A new central Directory server, based on the more recent '93 edition of the X.500 standard, which supports replication, was set up by DANTE and populated with necessary information. Both new and old servers worked in parallel during December 1999, making a smooth reconfiguration of national directory servers possible. 31 December 1999 was the last day that the old Quipu server was operational.
As part of the DIRECT project (http://www.terena.nl/projects/direct/), proposed by SURFnet and supported by TERENA, it has been agreed in early January that DANTE would provide the co-ordination between the X.500 directory and the national servers, most of which are moving to an LDAP-only solution.
The open meeting on NameFLOW announced in the last Works of DANTE took place in London on 20 January 2000. It was the occasion for us to clarify DANTE's role and activities. The X.500 replication prototype, which is the basis for the 3 directory models (X.500(93), Quipu, and LDAP) was also successfully demonstrated at this occasion.
For personal reasons relating to the forthcoming birth of twins, Cathrin Stöver (DE) and Jose de Arce (SP) have also left the company at the end of February and returned to Spain, where Jose will now be working for Telefonica. Cathrin first joined the company in October 1997, and Jose in August 1998. We wish them all the best!
