TERENA Activities

Internet2 Members Meeting, International Task Force8 October 2007

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› A not-for-profit association of European National Research and Education Networks

› Based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

› Membership:

› 36 National Members (NRENs)

› 2 International Members (CERN & ESA)

› 10 Associate Members (DANTE, NORDUnet, equipment vendors & telecoms operators)

› Main goals:

› Representing common interests and opinions of membership

› Knowledge transfer

› Developing, testing and promoting new technologies

› Fostering new services

TERENA Organisation

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› Compendium has been published annually since 2000.

› Collection of relevant information about European and some African, Asian and N & S American NRENs (58):

› Organisational information and legal form

› Funding and staffing details

› Number of users/clients, and type of connectivity

› Internal and external connectivity, capacity of links, technologies, dark fibre availability

› Traffic data

› Types of services offered

› Provides overview of network status in each country.

› New 2007 edition available on TERENA website, and as published report.

› http://www.terena.org/activities/compendium/

NREN Compendium

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› GN2 networking activity to investigate the evolution of European research and education networking over next 5+ years.

› Seven sub-study areas:

› Organisational and Governance issues

› Economic issues (move to dark fibre, and provision of new services)

› Researchers’ needs (what type of network and services are required?)

› Other users’ needs (e.g. schools, healthcare, arts & humanities)

› Technical issues (transmission, control plane & routing, network virtualisation, operations and performance, middleware)

› Geographic issues (developing measures to quantify digital divide)

› Campus issues (infrastructure, services, expertise and collaboration)

› Aims to identify trends, developments and to make recommendations for future research and education networks.

› All sub-study reports plus final conclusions available shortly.

› http://www.terena.org/activities/earnest/

EARNEST Foresight Study

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› Promotes, develops and tests technologies that allow roaming between networks.

› Established the eduroam pilot service that permits inter-institutional WLAN roaming.

› Currently involved in GN2-NA5 activity to develop eduroam into full production service.

› New activities include:

› Improving monitoring and measurement of eduroam service.

› Considering how to facilitate interoperability with other roaming services.

› Looking at Mobile IP implementations, particularly MIPv6.

› http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-mobility/

TF-Mobility

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› Discusses middleware issues and fosters collaboration.

› Established Secure Certificate Service (SCS).

› Setup Schema Harmonisation Committee (SCHAC) to develop standard identity schema for higher education inter-institutional data exchange.

› Currently working on REFEDS (Research and Education Federations) initiative:› Investigating technical specifications for authentication and authorisation

between identity federations

› Defining policies and guidelines for peering of federations, starting from common denominators.

› How to handle overlaps between R&E, government and commercial sectors.

› Agree “Levels of Assurance”.

› Identify major projects that can benefit from cross-federation peerings.

› Organised 1st International REFEDS meeting on 3 September 2007 in Prague.

› http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-emc2

TF-EMC2

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› Promotes collaboration and knowledge transfer between European CSIRTs.

› Includes NREN, ISP, government and commercial CSIRTS.

› Meets three times per year, to discuss issues of common interest and new approaches.

› Establish pilot services (e.g. trusted introducer, tracker database) and common standards and procedures).

› Assist new CSIRTs (e.g. through training and mentoring).

› Prevent miscommunication between NRENs, the EU, and national governments.

› Developed TRANSITS training material and runs training courses (with FIRST and ENISA).

› http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-csirt/

TF-CSIRT

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› Promotes collaboration in areas of public relations and information dissemination.

› Aims to improve exchange of information within the European R&E community.

› Established PeAR news wire – online system for posting news items.

› Develops and publishes publicity material of common interest.

› Produces Glossary of Terms, HOWTOs and FAQs.

› http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-pr/

› http://www.terena.org/news/community/ (PeAR)

TF-PR (Public Relations)

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› Works to improve service and product delivery amongst NRENs.

› NRENs must provide services to increasing demanding and critical users.

› NRENs are facing competition from commercial ISPs, so must continue to distinguish themselves.

› Compares and analyses NREN service portfolios (e.g. what services are offered)?

› Compares service level agreements.

› Shares information and ideas for new services (e.g. Mail Dike).

› http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-lcpm/

TF-LCPM (Life Cycle and Portfolio Management)

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› Established in response to need for SSL server certificates in research and education community.

› Many NRENs had set-up a CA, but issued certificates not listed as trusted by web browsers (the ‘pop-up’ problem).

› Purchasing certificates directly from commercial CAs is expensive.

› TERENA contracted GlobalSign to run dedicated CA for NRENs (and by extension their user communities).

› Service commenced in 2006, and will run until at least 2010.

› Enables certificates to be issued for low cost.

› Currently 14 participating NRENs (acting as RAs), and >10K certificates issued.

› http://www.terena.org/activities/scs/

Server Certificate Service(SCS)

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TERENA Academic CA Repository (TACAR)

› A trusted repository for holding verified root CA certificates of TERENA members.

› Holds certificates directly managed by the member NRENs, belonging to national academic PKIs, or related institutes or projects (e.g. EUGridPMA).

› Operating since 2003.

› Accreditation process for collection and updating of certificates in root CA.

› Certificates made publicly available via secure website, along with policies

› http://www.terena.org/activities/earnest/

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6DISS Project

› Provided IPv6 training and knowledge transfer in various regions around the world.

› Utilised operational experience of 6NET and Euro6IX projects.

› Organised 13 practical training workshops & 2 informational events.

› Developed extensive IPv6 tutorial material that may be freely used.

› E-Learning package with Portuguese and Russian subtitles (others can potentially be added) available online and as CD image.

› IPv6 Deployment Guide available.

› IPv6 testbed available for training and testing purposes.

› http://www.6diss.org/

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› New EC-funded project (under FP7 e-Infrastructures).

› 21 partners, including 11 NRENs, Juniper & Siemens.

› Aims to develop a European-wide scalable and technology agnostic network infrastructure for disruptive experiments.

› Testbed will initially comprise dedicated 1 GE circuits between CH, CZ, DE, IT and PL, with ES and GR connecting via existing production circuits using Ethernet over MPLS.

› Will offer virtualised resources such as routers and circuits using the ‘slice’ paradigm that can support multiple experiments in parallel.

› A tool-bench will be developed to leverage existing virtualisation and network control mechanisms, and extend these to support multi-domain management and monitoring.

› Testbed planned to be operational in late-2008, initially offering VLANs supported by L2 MPLS.

› Plan is to offer usage of facilities to NRENs and other FP7 ‘FIRE’ projects.

FEDERICA Project

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