_______________________________________________________________________ * * A bi-monthly electronic news bulletin * * reporting on the activities of DANTE, * the company that organises international * network services for the European THE WORKS OF D A N T E research community. No.37, January/February 2000 Editor: Marine Chartois _______________________________________________________________________ * HTML version: http://www.dante.net/pubs/works/37.html * _______________________________________________________________________ POSITIONS AVAILABLE AT DANTE DANTE is currently recruiting Network Engineers. The deadline for applications is 14 March 2000. More information can be found on our website: http://www.dante.net/jobs/nes.html TEN-155 ACCESS PORT AVAILABILITY The figures for TEN-155 show an average access port availability of 99.78% for December 1999, with six of the nineteen connected networks enjoying 100% availability, and an average availability of 98.28% in January 2000, with thirteen of the networks enjoying 100% availability. 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%. TEN-155 PLANNED UPGRADES The T3 ring operating at 45 Mbps between Paris, Geneva and Madrid is currently being tested, and is expected to become operational on 17 March 2000. 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. TEN-155 INTERCONTINENTAL INTERCONNECTIVITY DANTE and Canarie, the operator of the Canadian research network CAnet, have signed an interconnection agreement that provides for interconnection at the DANTE point of presence in New York. This will add to the research network interconnections provided by DANTE, which currently include Abilene and NACSIS, with a further connect to Esnet due to come into service within a couple of weeks. 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. TEN-155 SURVEY DANTE undertakes and submits regular evaluations to the European Commission on the services which it offers. In this perspective, we are currently co-ordinating a survey on our TEN-155 IP (Best Effort) service. 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. TEN-155 MANAGED BANDWIDTH SERVICE Several projects have been using MBS in the past couple of months, both "old" (SUSIE, EDISON...) and new: METODIS, a French project using distributed computing, is active between France and Germany; COIAS, which started at the end of February, is also involving France, this time with the United Kingdom, while a VPN has been set up between the Japanese physics laboratory KEK and CERN in Switzerland. Please note that all inquiries regarding the TEN-155 MBS should now be addressed to Tim.Streater@dante.org.uk. AUCS INTERCONNECTIONS The last interconnection with AUCS in Stockholm was rolled out on 5 January 2000, making the four connections planned in the contract complete. Traffic congestion on the link has led DANTE and AUCS to increase the bandwidth from 20 Mbps to 35 Mbps, and the performance has improved immediately afterwards. FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS A major series of upgrades should take place on TEN-155 in the next few months. 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. NAMEFLOW UPDATE In accordance with DANTE's Y2K policy (http://www.dante.net/y2k.html), the NameFLOW services, which until recently were based on software implementing the '88 version of the X.500 standard, has been migrated to a Y2K-compliant system during the last weeks of 1999. 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. STAFF AT DANTE Due to a long illness, Karen Bartlett (UK) left the company on 31 December 1999. Marine Chartois (FR) has taken over as External Relations Manager as of 1 February 2000. Marine has graduated from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Lyons, and has a specialisation in "Droit des Relations et Echanges Culturels Internationaux". For personal reasons relating to the forthcoming birth of twins, Cathrin Stoever (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!