RIPE 38

Netnews-WG
RIPE 38, Amsterdam January 2001

Chair: Dave Wilson

Admin stuff

* Felix Kugler is taking notes.
* The agenda is accepted as is.
* No comments were received regarding the minutes from the last
meeting at RIPE 37.

NHNS (Daniel Diaz)

Daniel has submitted an Internet Draft about the NHNS system to the
IETF. [1] is an individual publication and
valid until April 2001. So far only one comment was received
concerning the draft.

Daniel changed jobs last November and has now temporarily lost access
to his NHNS root servers! Still both "private" (usenet.) and "public"
(usenet.nhns.net.) NHNS clouds are supported. The private DNS tree
(usenet.) will no longer be supported in future, though.

Setup of the public NHNS cloud:
* primary nameserver for usenet.nhns.net hosted by Satec (ES)
* secondary nameserver hosted by Dave Wilson, HeaNet (IE)

All info about NHNS is available on [2]http://nh.nhns.net.

Next steps:
* move primary nameserver to a RIPE platform and restart the public
pilot
* rewrite some of the tools, especially the dynamic update script
* update the Internet draft
* strive towards an operational, stable service

Flowmaps (Kai Siering)

No progress since RIPE-37 meeting.

The flowmaps software is available for download on
[3]http://newsbone.uu.org/RIPE-38, example pictures can be found there
as well.

The tool requires "inpath"-like raw data collected on a news server.
Visualization is done using Cyclic software. Processing one day of
data needs approx. 10 minutes on a modern Pentium hardware. Real time
visualization would require a dedicated, very fast machine.

Visualization features:
* 3D-view of news flows around the target machine where the raw data
was collected
* zoom in/out
* change viewpoint
* nodes and links are clickable, small windows pop up showing
details

It seems valuable to be able to visualize traffic volume instead of
number of articles in future. Other suggestions and comments from test
users regarding new features are welcome.

Agenda RIPE-39

No new topics were proposed by the audience during the meeting.

References

1. http://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/ftp/mirror/internet-drafts/draft-diaz-nhns-00.txt
2. http://nh.nhns.net/
3. http://newsbone.uu.org/RIPE-38