the little garden / TLGnet Inc 3 and last

Received: from relay1.UU.NET by fnord.tlg.org (8.3/wps.com-hackery) id MAA02194; Mon, 31 Jan 1994 12:41:41 -0800 Received: from cygnus.com by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AAwbgs08709; Mon, 31 Jan 94 15:42:49 -0500 Received: from fenchurch.MIT.EDU by cygnus.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA17472; Mon, 31 Jan 94 12:42:42 PST Received: from localhost by fenchurch.MIT.EDU id PAA13164; Mon, 31 Jan 1994 15:40:49 -0500 Date: Mon, 31 Jan 94 15:40:47 EST From: "M. Strata Rose" &lt;strata(a)fenchurch.MIT.EDU&gt; Reply-To: strata(a)fenchurch.MIT.EDU To: private-garden(a)cygnus.com Cc: strata(a)fenchurch.MIT.EDU X-Tlg-Info: The Little Garden Network-- affordable Internet today! X-Tlg-Info: Finger info(a)tlg.org for info, speeds from 14400 to 56K & T1 X-Tlg-Info: San Francisco - Santa Cruz - Berkeley - San Jose areas Subject: meeting notes Message-Id: <CMM.0.90.0.760048847.strata@fenchurch> Status: OR I feel officially silly-- after typing in the meeting minutes a few days ago, I realized I hadn't actually *posted* them. Luckily I remembered this before calling Tom and asking what was wrong with the mailing list....anyway, here they are, I apologize for the delay. Tim, John, Tom, and others, feel free to correct or clarify my summations and/or paraphrasings of what you actually said, I was taking brief notes and trying to keep up with the flow of conversation and topic-jumping. This also makes them somewhat disjoint topically, but I felt that keeping the meeting flow in the transcript was more important than trying to group topics after the fact. Pull up the message with the posted agenda in another buffer and you can see what we were trying to stick to... Notes from TLG Meeting at 444 Market St. POP, 1/19/94 Tim Pozar, TomJ, & John G. suggest $800/mo as T1 colocation. Hubbub, folks start talking about IP redirect services. TomJ runs mini-service ("scamatron") for IP-redirect stuff via telnet. John Hargin [Harkins?] is TLG customer who is doing colocation, has own rate structure. Discussion as to saving space in crowded POP. Strata offers possible second POP location in Sunnyvale. Mark from WIRED mentions their expansion plans, have budgeted space for colocation facilities. Tim & co point out that physical site of 444 Market is very security conscious and that colocation would have access problems regardless of space, only very few people on access list now and they don't have time to babysit colocated machines. Various arguments on topic of "I want to colocate for reliability and won't use the full bandwidth, shouldn't I be able to pay less". Metering/analysis software need brought up by various. John mentions HNMS, Hierarchical Network Mgmt System, could do metering we need. Company is negotiating with Cygnus for support of HNMS, it will be released to public if they work out a contract. John will file FOIA to get it otherwise (assuming it looks interesting enough). WRT wider pipes and response from Toad POP folks, John offers to widen pipe to T1 to Toad for better latency if he can get Toad POP community to help with the $500/mo difference. Response from Toad folks present is enthusiastic, looks like it will happen. Given that, there is some amount of space w/TLG member physical access for colocation on T1 ether, talk to John for details as to how that's progressing and what the availability is. T1 colocation rate still applies, BTW. Offical thanks to KKSF (Tim Pozar's employers) for donating ~$3K of vital wiring & etc Stuff to the setup at 444 Market; they will have SLIP connection with fees waived for some considerable time approximating their donation to the cause. TLG info business cards passed out, Rich Morin donated his extra cardstock from his business printing and had his printer do up all his extra sheets with the card design. Contact him to get a handfull to give out to interested parties, still has sheets that haven't been cut to card-size yet. NNTP servers: newsfeeds are our primary traffic on TLG in the opinion of those who've been watching our traffic, lots of it going down skinny pipes. John Harkins has NNTP service for nominal fee to TLG members, much less than UUNET. Possible Cygnus donation of Sparc 1+ for NNTP server mentioned, John G. is upgrading hoptoad. Edward Elhauge is interested in setting up Garden-wide NNTP on a fee basis. General agreement that having an NNTP server on each POP would be desirable to keep traffic of leaf sites local to POP. Bill Custer agrees to organize 814 University NNTP server, Edward E. & Fen will organize Toad NNTP server. People in either of those POP communities should get in touch with those folks to see what they can do to help or donate in the way of time/materials-- they're organizing a volunteer effort, not committing to doing it singlehandedly. The 814 University POP is now moving to the TLG "pay your own POP" model; it has been subsidized for a while now. Basic arrangement similar to Toad's-- leased line is paid by TLG, 56K rate of $325/mo is paid by POP Responsible Party/Group, TLG gives them $10 kickback for each 14400 connection at POP. Dollar amounts paid by individuals at 814 will not differ by more than a few bucks per person after conversion says TomJ. John G. asks assembled members for support for conversion, general assent. Bandwidth issues for usage-based rates comes up yet again, from discussion of whether 814 University folks are using more than their "fair share" since they have multiple machines on POP-local ethernet. Various folks draw formal attention to "are we growth-based or do we parcel out bits grudgingly?"-- ie do we assume we will keep adding T1 connectivity from the outside if we need the bandwidth? [yes] We need to set some baseline rates for "measured rate", ie you should be able to get a wide pipe and not use the full width, but be charged for a combination of bit usage and latency. More discussion of whether or not measuring will put noticeable drag on the net, nothing conclusive. Coming up with the abovementioned charging model would also facilitate POP startup, since folks could pay to have a wider pipe than they would use put in for future expansion, grow more slowly and need a smaller group to spawn a POP. Various pricing models proposed, ranging from John G. 64K steps to latency baserate + stepped usage. Issue needs more exploration, dropped for this meeting. POP Security-- right now anyone could compromise a single host and sniff passwords for anyone elseon TLG net, this is Not Good. Stu, TomJ, Tim, John G are setting up router ring topology and bridging POP-local traffic so that the routers don't touch cross-POP hosts, each router touches only other routers who in turn talk to local POP hosts. Good idea, general kudos to them. Now a WWW (World Wide Web) server on TLG.ORG, PC-based BSD unix box; TLG members running Web servers can put a pointer URL on TLG.ORG "Member Web Servers" page, contact TomJ or Tim P about this. March issue of WIRED will carry TLG ad, will run every other month. TLG.ORG is mostly DNS, admin info, the mailing lists. Stu, TomJ, Tim, and Tom's new intern Flesh have accounts, tlg-ops. Dave Sharnoff mentions he gateways his email to newsgroup format on his machine, talk about need for downstream/POP based mailing lists, hard to contact neighbors on local POP when TLG.ORG is out if that's where all the mailing lists are! Kee points out that TomJ has made sublists but we still need per-POP access lists so people can offload local POP maint and make POPS more independent. John G mentioned Randy Bush is doing profiles/lists of toasternets, contact him (Randy) if you want info or have listings. Will be published in paper and HTML/Web served. Tim Pozar needs 300M drive & Adaptec controller for 444 Market, spontaneous hat passing nets $350. Nice work & a good feeling... Tim P. is working with McGraw-Hill on a pending 56K connection in San Mateo to TLG. He has asked them about colocation of TLG equipment to make a San Mateo POP but they are wary. Peter & Tim will investigate if Frame Relay makes sense for this pipe, McGraw is apparently in or near a building loaded with net-goodies. Various folk point out that random closet rental can bridge TLG service gap between Palo Alto and SF. There is concern about McGraw & another potential TLG customer sucking down "too much" bandwidth. John G talks a little about how you buy latency with a T1, not stricly bandwith, but still there are no guarantees on speed. We [TLG] have never guaranteed constant bandwidth, ie 56K pushed to 56K 7x24, but instead worked out varying rates so that we approximate bandwidth by steps (14400, 56K, T1) with rates that let the bigger connections take a bigger share of the cost. Dave Sharnoff mentions WRT latency, he chunks his NNTP data down to the smallest packet size he can to keep decent latency on simultaneous typing/telnet access on his link, suggests it as a technique to improve 14400 connection performance. John G & Tim suggest that he is dragging down overall network performance by doing this, don't recommend it but no clear consensus on what the effect would be if more folks were doing it. TomJ talks about statistical multiplexing briefly. TomJ: wants help by skillset. Fen suggests mailing list for potential helpers. Tim P offers gopher list for helpers skills. Peter suggest finger account for help(a)tlg.org w/contact list, also setup a help mailback of info using the vacation program. Tim P mentions SJ POP, send potentials to TomJ, we would like to start one. NOS boxes-- only one left, TomJ praises the Livingston boxes for running smoothly once set up, notes that the documentation was hell though. More general discussion of problem solving-- several people brought up a suggestion that we should do PacBell-like cost recovery on troubleshooting. If the problem turns out to be on your end, charge time and materials for looking into it. Need more discussion on how to implement this. Trouble tickets: we need some kind of system; Cygnus has one that we could adapt, and NEARNET has a free FTP-able one as well. Roger Klorese commits to looking into various systems on our behalf. Thanks Roger! TomJ does virtual intro of Randy Mills aka Flesh, his new "intern" (Flesh couldn't make it due to a last-minute schedule conflict). Tom has budgeted $100/mo at first, and mentions that both his and Flesh's stipends should go up as TLG starts breaking even/getting ahead. Flesh has been educating himself in PC tech and BBS stuff, is sharp and interested. TomJ has set him up with a connection on the maintainance port of the 444 Market router w/2400 baud TCP/IP, will upgrade to 9600 when he can scrounge modems. Fen donates pair of 9600 baud modems on the spot, cool. TomJ comments as an aside that he's enthused about getting more folks like Flesh involved with TLG, people from the non-techy side of the world, punks, artists and the like. The Spreadsheet: Tom has new estimates, so spreadsheet at meeting is gloomier than real picture. He observes that we seem to be growing by approx $500/mo. We have to spend $2400 to start up new T1's, $600 for new 14400 (TLG buying ports for new customers to connect to). TomJ has done approximations of a step-up curve where cost/resources/new members are tied into steps where we have to expand. Tom T mentions that we should encourage folks to upgrade their SLIP/PPP connections when the new modem chipsets are widely available in May, as it leverages our current ports into higher revenue without additional cost to us. More grumbling/concerns over large customers (corporations, network services) potentially "sucking dry" the pipe. TomJ points out that all of TLG averaged less than 56K over 5 min spikes in September. John G points out that the entire Internet was on T1 in 1993, w/many 56K interconnects, and that the arpanet/Internet was on 56K for years. Slight digression into T1 costs of our competition, Tim P says Barrnet is cheapest, $600+/month for T1 but (gotcha) no resale. Mini-history review of Barrnet decision, went to no resale because of "predatory" ANS routing pricing for downstream resellers (figure of $55K/year/service provider-reseller was mentioned). Tom's salary: nothing really decided except that TomJ deserves more money and less hours, and that Flesh's presence and a help-list will alleviate the latter complaint but that we need more members and to start running more in the black to work on the $$ issue. John G reminds folks that there's also the matter of eventually repaying his $10K TLG starter loan at more than $40/month, too. WRT TomJ's hours and offloading, we will try to formalize some of the written docs that he has done and put them where they are easier to get to. TomJ has already set up some docs on tlg.org for FTP, we will put up HTML (Web) and probably gopher stuff too. Strata volunteers to edit and otherwise help assemble docs. TimP has partial book/manual, as does TomJ. Rich suggests monthly open house/class for TLG newbies. General enthusiasm for this idea. Peter says have them bring in their machine and just *set it up* as part of the class/workshop, and/or put together a kit like the one the WELL sells for new members, sales of the kit can help with TLG cash problem as well. Robert points out that SW developers and the phone company slam folks for asking questions and taking tech time if the answers are in the manuals/provided docs, maybe we need to do this too (cost recovery again). Will Kreth mentions BAIL (Bay Area Internet Literacy?) and their toasternet classes, they have a committed space reservation that they don't fully use and may be open to letting TLG host/cohost classes in the space. Will will post BAIL info to TLG list, also bail-list-request(a)well.sf.ca.us for info on their classes. Send mail to strata(a)fenchurch.mit.edu re: skills you have that might be helpful to TLG members getting connected and/or maintaining their connection. List ones you are comfortable with volunteering to newbies as well as more experienced folks, and don't list things you know that you consider a potential waste of your limited time, ie for a routing expert to be spending an hour on the phone telling someone how to configure their modem. Strata will collate and post a list, as well as periodic updates as we get new members. That's basically it, folks... ************************************************************************* M. Strata Rose Unix & Network Consultant, SysAdmin & Internet Information Virtual City Network (tm) strata(a)virtual.net | strata(a)hybrid.com | strata(a)fenchurch.mit.edu