From: dee@ranger.enet.dec.com (Donald.E.Eastlake@inet-gw-1.pa.dec.com, III)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Thrills of Long Distance
Date: 27 Jul 92 14:34:19 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 590, Message 1 of 6

In article <telecom12.588.4@eecs.nwu.edu> Cliff Stoll,
stoll@ocf.Berkeley.EDU writes:

> Pat compared the Usenet to Ham Radio.  Got me thinking.

> You know, in every technical medium, things start out pure and sweet
> and exciting; as they become cheaper and better and more popular, they
> lose their purity; their excitement too.

> Is the same thing is happening on the Usenet/Internet?  When you had
> to know the TCP/IP suite and there were a few hundred nodes on the
> network, we mostly knew each other.  It was a kicker to just get mail
> across the network or to ping another node.  There were fewer flames
> and nastygrams.

> With today's million node network, it's a rare Usenet group without
> flamewars.  You might recognize a few posting people, but how many
> have you met?  Malicious intruders break into computers.  Many
> postings have zero content.

Then again, there is usually something new coming along:

 From:	US1RMC::"deering@parc.xerox.com" "Steve Deering"  18-JUL-1992
 Subj:	IETF Teleconference

Steve Casner and I would like to thank all the people who helped to
pull off the 2nd IETF teleconference.  Bob Clements, Ron Frederick,
and Paul Milazzo spent long days operating the vat and dvc consoles
and the video cameras, a generous donation of their time for which we
are enormously grateful.  The excellent local networking facilities
were organized by John Curran and Jeff Schiller, and the on-site
sparcstations were provided by Chuck Davin and Paul Milazzo.  Van
Jacobson and Paul Milazzo (there he is again!) stayed up late to
generate new versions of vat and dvc in response to the new demands of
such a large conference. 

Many people around the global Internet provided multicast tunnel
machines to build the largest IP multicast topology to date -- at one
point during the week, the multicast routing table included 90
separate subnets (i.e., LANs and point-to-point links, NOT including
all of the subnets traversed by the tunnels), in 10 different
countries.  (I will post a map of the topology in a couple weeks,
after I get back from vacation.)  And many more tuned in to the audio
and video -- there were proabably over 100 sites that showed up in the
vat window over the course of the week (I hope someone else was
keeping count!).

To those of you who suffered less-than-acceptable audio/video
reception, or who couldn't be heard when you tried to talk back, or
who didn't manage to get hooked into the conference due to lack of
software for your machines or unexplained failure of the packets to
reach you or lack of response to your email queries, we offer our
apologies and the excuse that we only had finite time and resources,
at least some of which had to be devoted to other tasks (you know,
like chairing working groups and sleeping).  I hope you will all be
able to participate next time.

(Next time??  Oh no!  Well, plans are already underway for bigger and
better things at the November IETF, and many of the people who
provided tunnel machines have expressed an interest in keeping the
multicast topology up from now on, not just for IETFs.  Stay tuned to
the ietf list for further information.)

Steve Deering

 From:	US1RMC::"swb@nr-tech.cit.cornell.edu"  19-JUL-1992 
 Subj:	Re: IETF teleconference 

My opinions...

  >Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1992 08:00:27 -0700 (PDT)
  >From: Terry Gray <gray@cac.washington.edu>
  >Subject: Re: IETF teleconference

> I, too, was very impressed with the audio/video distribution of the
> IETF, and consider it extremely important work -- perhaps even the
> "silver bullet" that will help prevent IETF meetings from collapsing
> under their >own (scaling) weight.

> I don't think so.  While the IETF multicast was great to see, we have
> no hopes of multicasting every working group (there are 80?  90?  of
> them now) or the one-shot BOFs.  Also physical attendees still have a
> lot of advantages during question and answer time, and in meetings in
> the halls.

> Come to the Internet -- no longer just in the *text* form of IRC -- has
> not a technology been deployed which is in advance of the sociological
> and resource capacities of the Internet?  (I'm not suggesting the
> experiments.

Yes, absolutely.  We already melted some routers this time around.
We'll be taking steps to ease that problem, but from now on we will
occasionally be pushing the networks to their limits.

> 1. How legible were the overhead slides?

Looked okay to me, although you had to squint for some.

> 2. For sending semi-static info such as slides, how does multicast
> packet video compare with redistribution of an X window, or perhaps
> even sending a MIME message every time a new slide is put up (oops,
> there we go using mail as a layer 3 transport again!)

If we can get everyone to prepare slides in advance, and to use the
same format, and to know how to draw the impromptu ones with a mouse,
then this would be possible -- but that is highly unlikely.  I guess
the "next slide" function could include feeding a slide into a scanner
which would then multicast it.

You get into transport reliability issues here.

> 3. How important is it to see the jerky stick-like figures and
> talking heads?  Is this just for "ambience" or does it really make a
> difference?

I've found it really makes a difference.  I like being able to see
people smile and wave their hands.  The video will most definitely be
getting better, also.

	Scott

 From:	US1RMC::"van@ee.lbl.gov" "Van Jacobson"    18-JUL-1992 10:17
 Subj:	Re: IETF teleconference

> there were proabably over 100 sites that showed up in the vat
> window over the course of the week

Actually, I think you're underestimating by at least a factor of two.
I had to go out of town for a couple of days and, of course, my vat
monitor crashed so I don't have a total count.  But, thanks to a
memory leak in vat and a core dump gratiously provided by Steve Pink,
I know that an hour before the start of the Thursday plenary there
were 118 sites active (a list is attached).  I suspect that by the
start of the plenary another 50 or so sites showed up (vat crashed
trying to add six new sites) and on various screen dumps taken during
the Monday and Tuesday sessions I see 40-50 names that aren't on this
list.  So I'd say 200 sites for the week is a conservative lower
bound.

Having a live, Internet `chat line' that literally spanned the globe
was a unique experience.  For example, I was hacking alone in my
office with the speaker on around 4am when someone in Hawaii suddenly
said "Anyone here?" and, before I could even unmute my mike to reply,
people in Melbourne, Toronto, Stockholm and London came back with "Yes,
we're all here."  A week of talking to people on the other side of the
planet as casually as if they were just next door has left me with an
incredible feeling of community and a whole new sense of how connected
our world has become.

The audiocast was great work Steve and Steve!  Thanks for putting it
all together.

 - Van


13.1.100.22       dalfonso@weatherby.parc.xerox.com
13.1.100.238      juhlig@dollar.parc.xerox.com
13.1.100.30       Mark Verber (PARC)
13.1.101.240      PARC 32kbps gateway
13.1.248.2        jlarson@parc.xerox.com
13.1.68.2         Lixia (PARC)
13.2.116.128      jchow@kiwi.parc.xerox.com
13.2.116.33       swinehar@ptarmigan.parc.xerox.com
13.2.116.38       lyles@thyron.parc.xerox.com
13.2.116.62       Ron Frederick
13.2.116.9        nichols@osprey.parc.xerox.com
18.79.0.101       IETF Multimedia Multicast
18.79.0.102       IETF Terminal Room
18.79.0.103       IETF Listener
36.103.0.28       Mark J. Steiglitz (steig@cs.stanford.edu)
36.53.0.38        Networking Systems @ Stanford
128.100.102.11    Eric Carroll, University of Toronto, Canada
128.100.102.14    John Roth, University of Toronto
128.100.102.15    Canadian Rate Adaptation Gateway
128.100.15.7      evan@tach.ele.toronto.edu
128.100.15.8      evan@spike.ele.toronto.edu
128.100.2.20      Edwin Allum, University of Toronto, Canada
128.100.2.24      sandra@csri.toronto.edu
128.100.2.25      mart@genie.csri.toronto.edu
128.100.2.27      Dave Galloway drg@csri.toronto.edu
128.100.8.201     evan@chop.ele.toronto.edu
128.102.32.22     Milo Medin (NASA)
128.102.32.23     Dan McKernan (NASA Science Internet)
128.102.32.24     Warren Van Camp (NASA Science Internet)
128.102.32.25     feinler@wonderland.arc.nasa.gov
128.102.32.32     wade@discovery.arc.nasa.gov
128.102.32.42     Robert Gutierrez (NSI Network Ops)
128.109.178.98    whaley@happy.concert.net
128.112.128.209   Ira Fuchs (Princeton)
128.112.64.142    CIT Systems Group (Princeton)
128.112.64.75     Larry Rogers (Princeton)
128.113.24.31     finkej@ts.its.rpi.edu
128.119.40.203    hgschulz@erlang.cs.umass.edu
128.125.53.162    upadhyay@pismo.usc.edu
128.159.177.9     root@fddi_tx.ksc.nasa.gov
128.16.8.28       bkumar@tamdhu.cs.ucl.ac.uk
128.16.8.35       Ian Wakeman (UCL)
128.16.8.42       raphael@priest.cs.ucl.ac.uk
128.16.8.60       Saleem Bhatti (UCL)
128.16.8.62       Shaw Chuang, UCL
128.16.8.67       Jon Crowcroft@UC London
128.16.8.75       nismail@mercedes.cs.ucl.ac.uk
128.16.8.82       Mark Handley, UC London
128.16.8.83       sbaydere@magicflute.cs.ucl.ac.uk
128.165.114.1     Phil Wood (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
128.237.3.192     hsm@gx.sei.cmu.edu
128.253.205.16    swb@falcon.cit.cornell.edu
128.253.205.25    Jeffrey C Honig (Cornell University)
128.3.112.15      jackz@horse.ee.lbl.gov
128.3.112.35      Sally Floyd (LBL)
128.49.17.180     Ron Broersma (NOSC, San Diego)
128.89.4.97       BBN 6/315
128.89.5.196      rrosales@HAIN.BBN.COM
128.89.5.203      chowe@TOPAZ.BBN.COM
128.89.6.87       schroder@QUILL.BBN.COM
128.9.160.49      ISI, Los Angeles, CA
128.9.160.99      ISI, Los Angeles, CA
129.127.128.20    Simon Coppins (coppins@arch.adelaide.edu.au)
129.132.4.7       Adam Feigin, ETH Zuerich
129.215.200.48    Graeme Wood (EUCS, Univ. of Edinburgh)
129.22.8.109      Dan Brown CWRU
129.22.8.110      Dan Brown CWRU
129.22.8.136      limpach@elvis.INS.CWRU.Edu
129.240.2.203     Geir Pedersen, Univ of Oslo, Norway
130.15.48.20      Andy Hooper, Queen's U, Canada
130.153.128.31    shingo@simon.cs.uec.ac.jp
130.43.2.13       Erik Fair (Apple Computer)
131.108.62.192    Paul Traina (pst@cisco.com)
131.108.62.60     Paul Traina (cisco Systems)
131.123.2.37      bailey@usenet.mcs.kent.edu
131.123.2.60      Jeff Bailey (Kent State Univ)
131.187.1.136     Kannan (OARnet)
131.187.1.144     John - OARnet
132.146.15.7      Ian Tracey@BT Labs,UK.
132.146.15.9      Stuart @ BT Labs. 32kbit/s
132.160.3.9       davidc@sirius.net.Hawaii.Edu
132.236.213.102   root@OITSUN.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
132.249.20.39     root@pravda.sdsc.edu
132.249.21.240    Auditorium @ San Diego Supercomputer Center
132.249.22.23     Tom Hutton (San Diego Supercomputer Center)
132.249.23.242    moreland@happy.sdsc.edu
133.194.10.98     asaba@turing.isr.recruit.co.jp
134.207.7.51      John Shirron (NRL)
137.111.222.12    chrisc@blizzard.mpce.mq.edu.au
137.82.61.82      John Demco, UBC, Vancouver, Canada
137.82.8.23       John Demco, UBC, Vancouver, Canada
138.96.24.78      turletti@jerry.inria.fr
138.96.24.86      bolot@pax.inria.fr
138.96.48.45      dabbous@mars.inria.fr
139.130.204.2     Peter Elford (AARNet, Australia)
139.130.204.7     Mark Turner (Australian National University)
140.173.160.3     denny@mm6.erg.sri.com
141.211.128.10    dave@metro.citi.umich.edu
141.211.128.171   CITI at Univ of Michigan
144.110.64.18     smart@conger.mel.dit.CSIRO.AU
192.1.37.3        CLynn (BBN) Boston Ma USA
192.136.153.20    John Deuel @ Rice U.
192.136.153.23    Listening in @ Rice U.
192.16.123.103    Bengt Ahlgren, SICS
192.16.123.104    Anders Klemets, SICS, Sweden
192.16.123.104    Tommy Wallo (SICS)
192.16.123.212    steve@garuda.sics.se
192.16.123.243    Patrik Ernberg (SICS, Sweden)
192.16.123.251    Tommy Wallo (SICS)
192.41.112.145    Andie Ness (CSTR, Edinburgh)
192.43.207.12     kre@munnari.OZ.AU
192.47.242.60     Maryann et al (MITRE, VA)
192.47.242.60     Maryann et al (MITRE, VA)
192.5.146.123     mahdavi@darwin-146.psc.edu
192.52.71.21      ops@noc.near.net
192.71.100.4      Steve Pink, SICS Sweden
192.71.100.8      SICS Multimedia lab
192.87.45.3       dfk@reif.ripe.net