UIUCnet capacity planning As the UIUC Campus Area Network Architect, most of my time these days goes into maintenance and planning of the 300-subnet U of I data network. The current hot spots are the huge ballooning in packet rate all over campus due to the recent multi-media explosion, and trying to get interoperability between various vendors' routing equipment.
The Terminal Servers CCSO provides dialin service for users of UIUCnet. The service is woefully overloaded, and in addition to bringing new modems on line, Christine and I are trying to come up with a plan to coerce saner usage patterns out of users. The problem is that dialin modem service doesn't scale very well and we can't just keep buying modems to satisfy demand.
ISDN
Following the dialin theme, CCSO is planning on offering a "high-end"
service to provide connectivity to UIUCnet and the Internet at fairly high
speed (64 or 128 kb/s) from user's homes. The connection model is Ethernet;
you'll set up a LAN in your residence and then CCSO will supply you with a
piece of equipment to connect your Ethernet to an ISDN Basic Rate Interface
line. The equipment then routes IP over this line, effectively giving you a
UIUCnet subnet in your home. This is proving to be a major undertaking, not
technically (the hardware is actually quite nice and hasn't given me many
headaches at all), but administratively, since it takes several different
groups within CCSO to manage, order, configure, and bill for this service.
I was hoping to get it deployed in September, but it didn't actually fly
until the first of November. Oh well, other things I've done missed their
projected due dates by even more.
More information is available.
You can order this service today. See the document or visit the CCSO
Resource Center.
ATM It's new, it's cool, be the first on your block to get the hottest new networking architecture. Really a scalable telecommunications switching architecture, ATM is finding its first applications in the data networking field. ATM operates over various physical standards, from the same 100 Mb/s optics that FDDI uses to a new IBM-proposed low-speed (25 Mb/s) coding which will run short distances over regular telephone wiring to SONET/SDH, an international fiber-optic transport which today supports speeds from 155 Mb/s to 2.4 Gb/s and theoretically has no scaling problems at any higher rate.
Only problem is, there are only the most embryonic of standards documenting just how to network using ATM. Combine that with the youth and general lack of community experience with the existing products, and it's damn scary stuff. We're playing with it, but it'll be some time before it's deployed in a production environment.
Wxmap Sort of my Internet claim to fame, wxmap is an X-based graphical weather display system. The current version is wxmap 1.16; the gleam-in-my-eye pointy-clicky version 2.0 has been on my whiteboard for many months, alas. Non-UIUC users should be aware that wxmap needs access to a server to provide it with timely weather data; this data arrives at UIUC from a commercial provider who prohibits us from redistributing it off campus. So unless your site is paying for their own Alden/Zephyr DD+ feed, the wxmap program itself won't be of any use to you. I suggest you explore the canned images available in GIF format on wx.research.att.com.
IETF I'm active in the Internet Engineering Task Force, The protocol engineering and development arm of the Internet. IETF activity is broken down into working groups, which are organized by topics into areas. The working groups I'm active in are the Audio/Video Transport (avt) group, which is working on a new internet protocol for transport of real-time information over the net, the Multiparty Multimedia Session Control (mmusic) group, which is studying session control protocols for multiparty conferences on the Internet, and the Interdomain Multicast Routing (idmr) group, which is developing a protocol-independent multicast routing protocol.
Maven I got annoyed at the Fall 1992 IETF when told that the "only serious platform" for multimedia conferencing was a hefty Unix workstation. I figured a Macintosh has better audio processing ability than a Sun (true!), so set about to write an audio conferencing tool for the Macintosh that would interoperate with the popular vat program for Unix. I've been mostly successful, but I need more time to get a slicker user interface. The current version is Maven 2.0d37. Eric Scouten did most of the work on '37 as a graduate student here at UIUC. Eric works for Metrowerks now.
Maven recently was included in a review of Internet "telephone" tools done by c|net. They tested version 2.0d18 of Maven; in my defense, the version available here has far, far, far better sound quality than the one they tested. I'll still call it a "technology demo," but hey, one gets what one pays for.