RAL PPD (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: Barry Saunders (B.J.Saunders at rl.ac.uk)
• My Institutional network support contact is: Roland Brandwood (Networking at rl.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:

Everything our side of the fibre connection to the site backbone

• The institutional contact is responsible for:

The site backbone and the connection to the Thames Valley Network

Question 3

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

• An RNO is:

A Regional Network Operator that connects indevidual sites to the JaNet Backbone

• I care because:

They carry my data

Question 4

What is SuperJANET4? And more importantly what is SuperJANET5?

• SuperJANET4 is:

The current generation UK academic network backbone

• SuperJANET5 is:

The next generation UK academic network backbone (due to replace SJ4 in Dec. '06)

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).

RALPP Network Diagram

Question 8

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

• Average traffic: 1.2/1.2 MB/s
• Peak traffic: 5.8/5.3 MB/s

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

• Average traffic: 13.9/11.5 MB/s
• Peak traffic: 59.6/41.2 MB/s

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

• Our total capacity is:

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

• Departmental plans:

Move Grid Cluster to a separate cluster to the rest of the Departmental systems with a more direct connection to the Tier 1 and TVN.

RALPP Network Diagram

• Institutional plans:
• 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:

Machine level firewalls rule are changed by SysAdmins, Site level firewall rules changes are requested from the helpdesk, they are then sent to the Site Security Officer for approval, Approved requests are implemented every Tuesday

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

• The capacity is:
• 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:

For your end-system:

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

• I understand: Somewhat

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

• I understand: A little

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

• I understand:

What application, I run a resource for users to run their applications on.