: Faster Internet Access by Fall, `98.
MOREnet and Missouri State University will be installing a third T1 circuit into the Internet on 8-27-98
bringing our total bandwidth to over 4.5 million bits per second.
All users on all three campuses should notice improved Internet response.
August 31st, 1998
The third T1 circuit was successfully activated today at about 8:50
a.m. Utilization
charts have been upgraded to show the additional circuit. Due to economic
factors, MOREnet decided not to provide a unit with two Ethernet interfaces as was
originally planned.
August 25th, 1998
Equipment was not available prior to the start of the fall semester to
perform this upgrade as originally planned. The equipment has now arrived and the
new T1 will be activated in testing mode at about 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, August 27 using
a new Cisco 3600 series router. Once initial testing is successful, the existing two
T1 circuits will be removed from the 2511 and reactivated on the 3600 series device.
IP addresses will remain constant allowing for a relatively smooth cut-over with minimal
impact on Internet service.
Hopefully, no complete outages will occur. However, if a complete
restart is required to integrate all three T1s, the outage should be no longer than 15
minutes. Please read on for more details regarding the planned conversion.
July 7th, 1998
Missouri State University Networking Administration in conjunction with MOREnet will be
installing a third T1 circuit from MOREnet to Missouri State University, Springfield. This circuit will
bring our Internet capacity to 4.632 million bits per second. This will be the
second upgrade to our Internet capacity this year. We opened the Spring semester
with only a single T1 circuit operating at 1.544M. A second circuit was installed
toward the end of the Spring semester which brought us to our current capacity of 3.088M.
With this line upgrade must come additional electronics. Missouri State University
currently operates its T1 circuits in load sharing (not load balancing) mode. This
feature requires that all T1 circuits terminate in the same physical piece of equipment
which is currently a Cisco 2511 communications server, Heimdall. It has two serial
interfaces (for the T1s) and one half-duplex Ethernet connection for the campus
attachment. MOREnet will be providing Missouri State University with a Cisco 3600 series router which
will have four serial (T1) interfaces and two half-duplex Ethernet connections.
Full-duplex is the ability to transmit and receive information over the
same interface at the same time. The serial interfaces run full-duplex, but the
Ethernet connections do not. With only 1.5M or even 3.0M or data dumping onto a 10M
Ethernet, no sever problems exist. However, trying to dump a constant 4.6M of data
onto a collision oriented Ethernet segment could drive the collision rate so high as to
lose data coming in on the serial connections.
To combat this problem, the new 3600 series device will have it's two
Ethernet interfaces programmed in uni-direction mode only. This means that one
Ethernet interface will be programmed only to receive information and the other will only
transmit information. Each of these interfaces will be attached to a backbone switch
and will allow for effective full-duplex operation (therefore without collisions) of the
machine even though the interfaces themselves don't support full-duplex mode.
All of this is only an interim solution to allow Missouri State University to access the
Internet without encountering bandwidth constraints caused by Missouri State University or MOREnet.
Obviously, once the data leaves our area of influence, we have no idea as to what
constraints might be encountered.
The "permanent" solution is still being developed by the
MOREnet3 Implementation committee, but will involve shaped OC3 circuits instead of T1
circuits and will be scalable. Initial bandwidth available will be 10M, the same as
is deployed in most parts of Missouri State University's 3 campuses today. This service is scheduled to
go online for IP (Internet Protocol) only services during 1st quarter 1999. Video
services will consume a relatively small portion of that bandwidth starting about 4th
quarter 1999. This new service will probably be scalable up to 45M without major
changes.
Exact installation dates are not available at this time, but will be
posted here once available. For more information on our current Internet services
and planned upgrades, please contact the web master at the address given below.
