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This page lists new developments in Telematics for Research activities during the past month, plus information about forthcoming events:
Sixth International Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution
International Task Force on Next Generation Networks
TERENA Task Force on LDAP deployment
Geant project for European research networking backbone launched
Fall 2000 Internet2 Member Meeting
'Trusted Introducer' Pilot Service for CSIRTs
DIRECT (DIrectory REplication CoordinaTion) project
Sixth International Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution
The Sixth International Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution will be held in Boston, MA, USA, from 20 till 22 June 2001. A strong technical program is expected, with exhibitions by leading vendors, and participation from leading researchers and practitioners in the field.The Call for Papers solicits contibutions on various topics including (but not limited to):
- Web Caching Architectures
- Cache Management Algorithms
- Streaming Media Caching and Distribution
- Application and Dynamic Content Caching
- Consistency Management
- Replication Strategies
- Content Distribution Networks Architectures and Protocols
- Workload Analysis and Characterization
- Benchmarking
- Content Peering and Alliances
- Standardization and Interoperability
- Deployment Experiences
The Sixth International Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution will be hosted by the Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. Further information is available at http://cs-pub.bu.edu/pub/wcw01/
TERENA Task Force on LDAP deployment
The TERENA Technical Committee today agreed on the establishment of a new task force to investigate the usability of LDAP version 3 as a base for a wide range of Internet services. The initial mandate of the task force, to be known as TF-LSD (LDAP Service Deployment), is for a period of two years. The task force will be chaired by Peter Gietz from the DFN Directory Services at the University of Tübingen, Germany. The task force secretariat will be provided by TERENA's Yuri Demchenko.LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a set of protocols for accessing information directories. LDAP is based on the standards contained in the X.500 standard, but is significantly simpler.
The aims of the task force will be:
- to provide a forum for exchanging experience and knowledge in the area of LDAP based services deployment;
- to prepare the establishment of a Europe-wide pilot White Pages index service;
- to contribute to the establishment of other Europe-wide directory services that are useful to the European research community;
- to contribute to and liaise with standardisation bodies in the directories area, and with related activities such as the follow-up of TERENA's DIRECT project and the openLDAP initiative.
TF-LSD had its kick-off meeting in Utrecht, the Netherlands on 20 September 2000. This meeting defined a large number of deliverables, which are planned to be produced in the period up to September 2002. The next meeting of TF-LSD will be held in the TERENA offices in Amsterdam on 2 February 2001. Full information can be found on the TF-LSD Web site:
http://www.terena.nl/task-forces/tf-lsd/
International Task Force on Next Generation Networks
On 5 December 2000 the TERENA Technical Committee approved the establishment of a task force on Next Generation Networking, TF-NGN. The mandate of the task force, is for a two year term and is based on the following initial work items:
- Diffserv AF Based Services
- Delay and Jitter sensitive based Services
- Over provisioned network performance analysis
- QoS monitoring
- Premium IP service specification and implementation plan
- Improvement of current multicast services
- QoS and Multicast
- Optical Networking
- Tools and techniques for network monitoring and traffic flow measurement
- IPv6
- MPLS based Guranteed Capacity Service specification and implementation plan
Like the TF-TANT task force TF-NGN is chaired by DANTE with secretarial supprt from TERENA. The activities will include the piloting of new services on the GEANT backbone as described in work-package 8 of the GN1 IST project; they will be carried out by participants from NRENs and any individual or representative of an organisation who can offer appropriate expertise, manpower, equipment or services.
The first meeting of TF-NGN was held on 20 and 21 November 2000 in Paris, hosted by Renater, the French NREN. The next meeting is scheduled on 8-9 February 2001 at the University of Muenster, in Muenster, Germany. Further information is available on the TERENA web site at: http://www.terena.nl/task-forces/tf-ngn/ and on the DANTE web site at: http://www.dante.net/tf-ngn/
Geant project for European research networking backbone launched
The European Commission will sign a 80 million euro contract with the GÉANT Consortium, to put in place a 2.5 Gbit/s trans-European backbone for research and education. With GÉANT having already launched its tendering process to procure the necessary capacity and points of presence in 30 countries, all is now in place for network operations to begin early in 2001. Additional moves to extend these high-speed links from Europe to the research backbones of the USA and Asian regions are foreseen at later stages of the project.GÉANT will increase the geographic coverage of Europe's research networking backbone to 29 countries: the member states of the European Union (with the exception of the Netherlands), as well as Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Cyprus, Israel, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria. By offering a guaranteed quality of service, GÉANT seeks to encourage the emergence of new applications amongst the research community.
In recognising GÉANT as an important step forward, Europe's Research Council meeting in Luxembourg on 15th June 2000 has underlined the importance of continuing to upgrade the European research networking backbone infrastructure. With this in mind the Council has already invited the Commission to present initiatives for further upgrades of capacity to the order of 100Gbit/s.
The Geant project will be officially launched in a ceremony in Nice on 6 November 2000, on the occasion of the IST2000 conference.
Fall 2000 Internet2 Member Meeting - 29 October - 1 November 2000
The fall Internet2 Member Meeting is the annual meeting of UCAID (Internet2) and its official partners outside the United States. The meeting will be held in Atlanta from the 29th October till the 1st November 2000. The technical sessions will be structured along four tracks:- Advanced Applications
- Middleware
- Network Engineering
- Relationships and Partnerships
http://www.internet2.org/html/fall00.html
'Trusted Introducer' Pilot Service for CSIRTs
Contract for the provision of a 'Trusted Introducer' service for Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) is signed between TERENA and M&I/Stelvio BV of Amersfoort, the Netherlands, . The service has been set up as a pilot service and will initially run for a period of one year, from 1 September 2000 until 31 August 2001.Hackers, viruses, and security incidents caused by other sources are increasingly causing problems for the smooth running of the Internet. Professionally managed networks - including most National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Europe - have therefore established teams known as CSIRTs to deal with security incidents. Collaboration between these teams is very important because in many cases incidents originate from outside the network that is affected. Such collaboration needs to be based on strong trust between the teams; reliable CSIRTs together form a closely-knit community, which is sometimes referred to as a 'Web of Trust'.
Originally the 'Web of Trust' was based on personal relations between staff members of the CSIRTs concerned. However, with the growth of the Internet, and hence of the number of CSIRTs, and with frequent staff changes this is no longer feasible. Also procedures whereby a team is introduced into the 'Web of Trust' on the basis of a recommendation from a CSIRT that is already in that Web have turned out not to be scalable.
The 'Trusted Introducer' service has been set up to address this problem. The 'Trusted Introducer' will collect detailed information about CSIRTs and if a team meets certain criteria it will be awarded a "level-2" status. Information on level-2 teams as well as information on CSIRTs that have applied for level-2 status (i.e. level-1 teams) and any other CSIRTs (level-0 teams) will be published on the 'Trusted Introducer' web site. The information will be checked on a regular basis to ensure that it is still up-to-date and that level-2 teams still fulfil the criteria for that status. The service does not provide a form of certification and in itself level-2 status does not provide a guarantee for teams to be admitted to the 'Web of Trust'. It is expected however, that over time the scrutiny by the 'Trusted Introducer' will provide level-2 CSIRTs with sufficient status for other teams to build their trust on.
The 'Trusted Introducer' service originates from co-ordination activities between CSIRTs in Europe that are organised by TERENA. For the one-year pilot service, TERENA will act as a clearinghouse for European CSIRTs to establish and finance the service. Level-2 teams will be charged a small fee as a contribution to the costs of the service. If the pilot service is successful it is expected that the service will continue on a more permanent and self-sustaining basis.
Information about the service is available from the 'Trusted Introducer' web site at: http://www.ti.terena.nl/.
DIRECT (DIrectory REplication CoordinaTion) project
DIRECT (DIrectory REplication CoordinaTion) project is successfully finished by SURFnet and Technical Report is published. The report is also available from TERENA Library at http://www.terena.nl/libr/tech/2000/direct-fr.pdf.The goal of the DIRECT (DIrectory REplication CoordinaTion) project was to coordinate replication between country-level LDAPv3 referral servers and set up an experimental LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) replication service for a country-based (X.521) naming scheme.
Searching for LDAP entries containing LDAPv3 referrals will cause the request to be rerouted to a server that can answer them. These requests can be rerouted to a root server with knowledge of all country-level servers, or directly to the country-level server that has knowledge to answer the request, thereby eliminating a single point of failure. For reasons of scalability, the DIRECT project has used an approach in which an LDAP referral object contains extra attributes so it can serve 'one level' search requests without rerouting them. This approach is made possible using a feature implemented by Innosoft in their IDDS product.
The LDAP entries containing referrals should be obtained by replication. Unfortunately there is not yet a standard for LDAP replication, and as a result, manufacturers have implemented their own propriety replication methods. Given this situation, DIRECT implemented a method to create a 'referral file' containing these 'enhanced' LDAP entries using a 'mini-crawler'. This LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) 'referral file' for country-level servers is made available by DANTE as part of the NameFLOW service.
The IETF is working on standards for LDAP replication and the standards describing LDAP referrals are being extended. For the new standards to be used in large-scale LDAPv3 referral services, the option to do a 'one-level' replication or replication of single entries, is essential. Also the use of 'superior naming context reference' and 'subordinate naming context reference' attributes for LDAPv3 referrals, such as proposed in the recent IETF draft [LDAP-REFER], is essential for the applicability of LDAPv3 referrals in the context of large scale distributed LDAP Directory Information Trees.
Further information about the DIRECT project is available from:
http://www.terena.nl/projects/direct/
Updated: 30 July 2000 - telematics@terena.nl