|
Abstracts of the Refereed Papers to be PresentedSupporting H.323 Video and Voice in an Enterprise NetworkRandal Abler, Gail Wells, Communications Systems Center, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of TechnologyAbstractH.323 is a relatively new standard for video and voice transmission that specifies using IP packets as the transport. This opens the possibility of adding an inexpensive camera to a modern desktop, and allowing two way video-conferencing between any offices so equipped. While the H.323 specification addresses LAN networks, can H.323 be used in a WAN environment? What characteristics are necessary to support H.323 in the LAN and WAN networks, and what is the impact of H.323 on other traffic in the network? This paper attempts to outline the impact of running H.323 on a network and lay out some guidelines that should be useful for accommodating H.323 on both local and wide area networks.Driving by the Rear-View Mirror: Managing a Network with CricketJeff R. Allen, WebTV Networks, Inc.AbstractCricket is a tool that lets users visualize a set of measurements over time. It was designed to assist network administrators by letting them see and respond to patterns in their network. In this paper, I will describe the need we saw and attempted to resolve by writing Cricket, then describe the solution we came up with. Finally, I will describe some future work we expect to do to make Cricket a more proactive monitoring tool.Don't Just Talk About The Weather - Manage it! A System for Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Internet Performance and ConnectivityCindy Bickerstaff, Ken True, Charles Smothers, Tod Oace, Jeff Sedayao, Intel CorporationClinton Wong, @Home Corporation AbstractIn an environment where Internet access is mission-critical, Intel has created the Internet Measurement and Control System (IMCS) with three objectives: 1) Devise quantitative measures of Internet performance; 2) Monitor those metrics to detect performance problems before customers and employees start calling; and 3) Enable first line support in the Network Operations Center (NOC) to handle as many problems as possible without having to escalate to network engineering staff. Intel implements IMCS by measuring key statistics of ping measurements, HTTP GETs, and router accounting tables. Boundary conditions are set up for the key statistics, and alerts are sent if those conditions are exceeded. The NOC personnel that receive the alerts use predefined scripts for each kind of alert. To make IMCS accessible to all and very usable, IMCS presents all of its information on the Web. Even network debugging tools like ping and traceroute are accessible through web interfaces. IMCS has proven successful in detecting problems and changes in the Internet infrastructure, although problems have been encountered because of IMCSŐs active measurement techniques. Future improvements to IMCS include fixing the configuration format of boundary condition definitions, adding more services to be monitored, increasing the use of passive measurements, and improving how alerts are reportedJust Type Make! - Managing Internet Firewalls Using Make and other Publicly Available UtilitiesSally Hambridge, Charles Smothers, Tod Oace, Jeff Sedayao, Intel CorporationAbstractManaging Internet firewalls that can failover between each other is quite a challenge. When those firewalls are geographically dispersed and have a small number of people to bemaintain them, it becomes even more challenging. Intel Corporation has a small staff that manages several geographically dispersed Internet firewalls with failover requirements.These firewalls use a standard screened subnet architecture [1] with packet filtering inner and outer firewall routers and a number of bastion hosts between them. These bastion hostsprovide services with load balancing and disaster recovery for relaying SMTP mail, answering DNS queries, and proxying web requests. To manage this complex system offirewalls, IntelŐs Internet Connectivity Engineering staff have come up with a way to model all of the interrelated firewall as one distributed system. Host and router configurationsare considered source to that system and compilation and installation of that source is driven by the Make [2] utility. Packet filtering Access Control Lists (ACLs) are built by aMakefile. The Makefile assembles the ACLs and executes an Expect [3] script that installs them. We configure bastion hosts by configuring Make to drive rdist, which run overthe secure shell (SSH) [4]. In this way, only updated files are pushed out to the bastion hosts and passwords and other configuration information do not go in the clear. Ourexperiences with Make and these publicly available utilities are quite good - allowing us to manage a large distributed set of firewall devices. Using a Make driven approach requiresmuch discipline, however, to avoid the distribution of bad configurations. Future plans include ACL optimization and sanity tests before and after bastion host configuration pushes.Tricks You Can Do If Your Firewall Is a BridgeThomas A. Limoncelli, Lucent Technologies, Bell LabsAbstractFirewalls that forward packets like a bridge, rather than asa router, have many operational benefits. By decoupling routing from filtering, the firewall becomes a pure filter, unburdened by routing table or interface configuration.The result is increased flexibility. This paper explores some of the benefits we have found. Most of the benefits stem from the fact that a bridged firewall requires fewer transit subnets. Sometimes transit subnets are completely eliminated. It can be placed between any two network devices and act like a line filter without needing to change the logical routing of the network.It is easy to put one in series with another firewall for testing. Our examples include replacing an old firewall with a new one, moving a firewall from one router to another with zero downtime, firewalling off an individual office or lab, and others. In many cases topology changes are made without service interruptions. The operational procedures become much more simple. The paper also suggests future directions for research in this area.Network Documentation: A Web-based Relational Database ApproachWade Warner, Rajshekhar Sunderraman, Georgia State UniversityAbstractEvery organization managing a network of computers has a need to organize, maintain, and access information related to the network. Users at various levels of the organization need quick and convenient access to this critical information at all times. We propose a methodology which is Web-based and which uses relational databases at the back end to store and organize this information. We envision that this Web-based system will be used in an intranet environment and will provide several levels of access to different user types.
|
 Need help? Use our Contacts page.
First posted: 4 Mar. 1999 jr Last changed: 4 Mar. 1999 jr |
|
