Liverpool (10 Questions)

Question 1

Provide the name and contact details of your local (Departmental) and Institutional network support staff.

• My Departmental network support contact is: We have no departmental staff but the group staff are Michael George mpg@hep.ph.liv.ac.uk 0151 794 3396 Andrew Washbrook ajw@hep.ph.liv.ac.uk 0151 794 3315
• My Institutional network support contact is:

  Dave Tyson, Rob Ward, Diana Dainton and Stephen Moore network@liv.ac.uk

Question 2

Provide details of the responsibilities, together with the demarcation of those responsibilities, of your local and Institutional network support staff.

• The departmental contact is responsible for: maintenance of hardware and software relating to all equipment downstream of the HEP group's link to the University network.
• The institutional contact is responsible for:

  The CSD network team is responsible for providing and maintaining the main campus communications infrastructure and managing associated services such as the DNS, NTP service, network monitoring and firewall provision. This includes the external connections to SuperJanet, the core routers and switches all the way through to the end user connections (for departments which use CSD building wiring) or the building switch (for departments which have their own wiring).

  The team has general expertise in all areas, but individual people have more specific expertise. E.g Stephen Moore looks after the Halls networking and wireless; Rob Ward looks after network monitoring with Snort and also maintains the firewall and the NNW connection; Diana Dainton looks after the Nagious Network monitoring and PCTC stats etc and maintains the Network Configuration Guide web pages and utilities and I look after the DNS, NTP service, DHCP service and look after the base operating system used by the network infrastructure.

Question 3

What is a Regional Network Operator (RNO), and why does this matter to you?

• An RNO is: A Regional Network Operator is an organisation that operates a regional network and holds a contract with UKERNA for the delivery of JANET services to those organisations which receive PRIMARY connections via the regional network.
• I care because:

  It matters to us because the RNO actually provide the network services which allow our University to have a PoP on JANET. Our RNO is Network North West.

Question 4

What is SuperJANET4? And more importantly what is SuperJANET5?

• SuperJANET4 is: SuperJANET4 is the current version of the Joint Academic NETwork.
• SuperJANET5 is:

  SuperJANET5 is the next version. Transition from 4 to 5 is due to begin in mid 2006 with SuperJANET4 closing in December 2006.

  SuperJanet5 provides more resilience against Network Failure compared to Superjanet 4. The intent is to remove a lot of the single points of failure at both the RNO and end site.

Questions 5, 6, 7 and 9 (part)

5: Draw a simple diagram showing your local (Departmental) network and sufficient of your Institutional network such that you can trace a line from your end-system to the connection from your Institutes network into the RNO infrastructure.

6: On the diagram produced in answer to Question 5, show the capacity of each link in the network and provide a note against each link of its contention ratio.

7: On the diagram produced in answer to Question 5, colour and distinguish the switches and routers and for each device provide a note of its backplane capability.

9.x: On the diagram produced in answer to Question 5 colour in the firewall(s) (or other security devices).

Question 8

What is the average and peak traffic flow between your local (Departmental) network and the Institutional network?

• Average and peak traffic: Peak is about 200Mbits/sec inbound and about 300 Mbit/sec outbound, average (varies in/out of term) is about 130Mbit/sec inbound and about 200Mbit/sec outbound.

What is the average and peak traffic flow between your Institutional network and the RNO?

• Average traffic:
• Peak traffic:

What is the total capacity of your Institutional connection to the RNO?

• Our total capacity is: Theoretically we could use 1Gbit/sec if the other institutions didn't have any traffic.

What are the upgrade plans for your local (Departmental) network; your Institutional network and the network run by the RNO?

• Departmental plans: We have no plans to improve the network here at the moment. The cluster is 1Gb/s and any additonal storage would also be placed on this 1Gb/s network.
• Institutional plans:

  The campus backbone will stay at 2Gbits/sec for now. The plan is to upgrade the NNW MAN - NNW LIV link to 10Gbits/sec. The link from NNW LIV ---> Liverpool Univ will probably stay at 1Gbit/sec for now.

• RNO plans:

Question 9

Do you believe in IS Security? Does your Institute believe in IS Security?

• I'm a believer: YES
• We're collective believers: YES

Do you believe in firewalls? Does your Institute believe in firewalls?

• I'm a believer: YES
• We're collective believers: YES

Provide information of how changes are made to the rule set of the firewall.

• Firewall rules are changed by: Liason between group administrators and University network administrators.

Provide a note of the capacity of this device and what happens when that capacity is exceeded.

• The capacity is: Capacity of the FW is 3Gbits/sec. We cannot exceed this at present as the feed is only 1Gbit/sec.
• When it goes over-capacity, the following happens:

Question 10

What is the best performance you can achieve from your end-system to an equivalent system located in some geographically remote (and friendly!) Institute?

• Best performance is: Realistically you could probably pull about 200-300Mb/sec from outside if the students are around. If we knock off the student residences then you could probably add another 100Mbit/sec to the above figure

For your end-system:

Do you understand the kernel, the bus structure; the NIC; and the disk system?

• I understand: YES pretty much

Do you understand TCP tuning and what it can do for you?

• I understand: YES in a manner of speaking

Do you understand your application and what it can do to your performance?

• I understand: Which application?