Innovative UO-based Networking Group Continues Its Cooperative Ventures Abroad

In less than a year, the NSRC has participated in workshops and conferences in Ecuador, Nepal, the Netherlands, Tunisia, Italy, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Senegal

Joyce Winslow
jwins@uoregon.edu

The Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), which has been based at the UO Computing Center since 1996, has been busy as ever providing educational programs and engineering assistance to regional networks around the world.

Since October 2003, various members of the UO/NSRC group have crisscrossed the globe more than half a dozen times to facilitate training workshops on a wide range of networking topics. By the end of July, the group will have participated in two workshops and a network architecture planning session in Ecuador, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meetings in both Tunis and Rome, the Africa Network Operators Group (AfNOG) 2004 workshop in Senegal, and training sessions in Nepal, the Netherlands, Venezuela, and Uruguay.

By sharing information, equipment, and technology, the NSRC aims to help develop regional Internet infrastructure for collaborative research, education, and international partnerships. Building from a three-year core grant from the National Science Foundation, it has developed strategic alliances with many partners in industry and academia to support its activities, establishing an extensive base of contacts willing to contribute time and expertise to help develop national and regional networks in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, the New Independent States, the Asia/Pacific region, and some educational network systems in the U.S. Below is a brief summary of recent and upcoming NSRC activities:

Ecuador. The workshops in Ecuador are designed to help develop Ecuador's national research and education network. When operational, this network will be useful to such research projects as the magmatic activity study currently underway by UO seismologists in cooperation with Ecuador's Escuela Politécnica Nacional.

The first of these hands-on training workshops was held in late February at a university outside of Quito; the next series is scheduled for July 26 to 31. Contributors to the February workshop, which focused on system administration and IP services, included NSRC instructor Hervey Allen, Maria Dolores Lizarzaburu (an Ecuadoran who works part time for the NSRC project), UO network engineer Carlos Vicente, and longtime NSRC volunteer and supporter Brian Candler. Instructors for this summer's wide-area network routing, monitoring, and security workshop in July will include UO network engineers José Domínguez and Carlos Vicente, as well as Mike De Leo of Cisco Systems.

In December 2003, UO/NSRC representatives also participated in a meeting organized by the Organization for American States (OAS) in Quito. UO Director of Network Services Dale Smith and NSRC project manager Steve Huter joined peer professionals in the region to share ideas on formulating science and technology policies and strategies for the hemisphere—particularly in the areas of information technology and communication and advanced networks and cyber infrastructure. Other major topics under consideration were cooperative strategies for nanotechnology, biotechnology, clean technologies, and renewable energy.

Nepal. NSRC instructor Hervey Allen will serve as a track leader at this summer's South Asia Network Operators Group (SANOG) workshops, a non-profit forum for data network operators in South Asia. Workshop topics include Linux system administration, network security, web services, the Domain Name System (DNS), and running large mail servers using Exim.

With assistance from the NSRC, SANOG organizes regional training programs for academic and commercial network operators in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Netherlands. Computing Center support specialist Lucy Lynch, together with NSRC project manager Steve Huter and the Internet Society's Mirjam Kuehne, coordinated the DNS/ccTLD registry workshop in Amsterdam, which ran from June 18 through June 22. Its aim was to provide technical training to the operators of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) who are managing servers and services for their national registries, and to foster relationships with colleagues in the industry.

Senegal. UO/NSRC participants in the fifth annual meeting of the Africa Network Operators Group, which was held in May, included Computing Center support specialist Joel Jaeggli, NSRC project manager Steve Huter, and instructor Hervey Allen.

A forum for technical coordination and cooperation among African Internet Service Providers and academic/research network engineers, AfNOG first came into being in 1999 with the assistance of the NSRC. Its aim is to provide technological training and education for network operators who are developing the continent's network infrastructure and Internet services, and to foster stronger international cooperation. The NSRC is currently working with regional networking groups to help establish a pan-African regional registry (AfriNIC).

Venezuela. Computing Center senior network engineer José Domínguez was the lead instructor for the routing and advanced services track at the WALC 2003 workshop in Merida, Venezuela, last October. Topics for this track included BGP, IPv6, multicast, and VoIP.

The NSRC operated a virtual routing lab for the workshop from the UO Computing Center and also loaned equipment and facilitated the donation of technical reference books for participants.

This fall at WALC 2004 in Cuzco, Peru, José will again be teaching the routing/infrastructure track, this time with the support of UO/NSRC colleague Carlos Vicente.

Uruguay. The NSRC has worked closely with the Latin American and Caribbean Addresses Registry (LACNIC) staff for many years and continues to collaborate with them on educational initiatives.

At a LACNIC meeting last March, senior network engineer José Domínguez gave tutorials on IPv6 and multicast. LACNIC's next meeting is scheduled for October 2004 in Costa Rica, where José will again be a presenter.

Acknowledgements. In addition to NSF grant funding, support for these recent NSRC activities has been provided by the Organization of American States, Cisco Systems, the Internet Society, Fundación para la Ciencia y la Tecnología, the International Development Research Centre, the Public Internet Registry, Qualys, O'Reilly Books, Cisco Press, Pearson Education, and DHL.

A brief history of the NSRC. The roots of the NSRC project trace back to a volunteer effort by Randy Bush to support networking in southern Africa in 1988, when he helped design and deploy a multi-country network that resulted in the first connections to the Internet for South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and later, many others. The NSRC was formalized in 1992 by Randy Bush and John Klensin with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the first of several NSF grants to support NSRC activities.

For more information about the NSRC project, contact Steven Huter (sghuter@nsrc.org).

1. AfNOG:
http://www.afnog.org/
http://ws.afnog.org/

2. AfriNIC
http://www.afrinic.net/sponsors.htm

3. CEDIA Consortium:
http://www.cedia.edu.ec/

4. Internet Society (ISOC)
http://www.isoc.org/
http://ws.edu.isoc.org/

5. LACNIC:
http://lacnic.net/sp/presentationsVI.html

6. NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/

7. NSRC: http://nsrc.org/

8. Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC):
http://ripe.net/

9. SANOG: http://www.sanog.org/sanog4/

10. Silk project: http://www.silkproject.org/

11. WALC:
http://www.walc03.ula.ve/
http://www.walc03.ula.ve/talleres/taller4.htm