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Report

by Jacek Gajewski, Workshop Co-Director,
on the Advanced Networking Workshop
Engineering the Virtual Silk Highway

About... The Virtual Silk Highway Additional information Deutsche Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY)

The NATO Advanced Networking Workshop "8th CEENet Workshop on Network Technology - Engineering The Virtual Silk Highway" started on 20 August 2002 at the Central European University Conference Centre in Budapest, Hungary. The Workshop is being attended by participants from 16 countries who are mainly the future operators of the Silk set-ups from Central Asia and Caucasus, and lecturers with NRENs and ISOC affiliations come from 7 countries as well as from Cisco, Lucent Technologies and EurasiaSat.

The programme provides lectures and hands-on exercises on serial communications, caching, security, advanced routing and middleware. A substantial part of the workshop is devoted to the theory and the practice of satellite communications. Exercises will use two real Virtual Silk Highway set-ups (2.4m dish, DAMA control unit and Cisco border router) and an additional 0.8m receive-only dish. Routing exercises, mimicking the real situation of NRENs and universities in Central Asia and Caucasus, are also planned. Evening discussions concentrate on the potential usage of the bandwidth by research and education communities, for example, distance education.

Prior to the workshop the Silk set-up was pre-configured at DESY Hamburg and sent to Budapest. The mechanical setup and positioning of two dishes towards the EurasiaSat satellite was done within 10 hours. Two lecturers were also assigned as neophyte operators and assessed the problems that would be encountered with the electronics installation. Most difficulties were associated with simple matters such as building proper control and management interface cables and having the right sized nuts and bolts.

Provisions were developed to allow the remote technicians to access and control the equipment. The electronics installation took less than 6 working hours from unpacking the equipment to online operation. The full two-way Budapest-Hamburg IP connectivity was finally established on Tue, 20 Aug 2002 15:54:07 CET.

Jacek Gajewski
Workshop Co-Director

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