N-1-3-012.43, "Spain: a RedIRIS Update", by Jose Barbera*, Currently, the number of RedIRIS user organizations has grown up to 108, with most of them belonging to the Higher Education and Public Research sector from various sizes and scope (see ISOC News, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1992, p.p. 12-13). Infrastructure -------------- Private X.25 backbone ARTIX has expanded along the first half of 1992 up to 9 regional nodes interconnected by 64 Kbps digital links. Presently, 50 RedIRIS member organizations (all main universities and research institutes in Spain) hold at least one access link to ARTIX. Others use PPSDN Iberpac connections to ARTIX, or simply the PSTN (eventual low-traffic volume users). Traffic volume on ARTIX has doubled from January to June, currently reaching 20 Gbytes/month. International bandwidth is 2 x 64 Kbps. A new 64 Kbps digital link Madrid-Amsterdam was added in May as part of the Ebone 92 infrastructure to supplement the former IXI (X.25) access point, which was used for some time to carry all traffic types. Now the IXI line is used for X.25-based traffic (X.400, XXX, DECNET), whereas the Ebone tail link is kept for IP and CLNS traffic. For transatlantic IP traffic, EASIgate (T1 CERN-Cornell) is currently used as the first option. Other links from Stockholm and London are used as back-up. Part of the RedIRIS infrastructure is also used by other networking organizations in Spain such as, UUES (Spanish branch of EUnet) and ESA Villafranca Station, which have subscribed proper agreements. Services -------- The RedIRIS environment offers a mixture of OSI and TCP/IP based services, as well as DECNET (High-Energy Physics Community). NJE (over different network architectures: IP, DECNET, SNA,...) is also supported, but the actual management remains under the responsibility of the EARN users group. * OSI --- - RedIRIS mail is the most widely extended OSI service. It is mainly based on an X.400 global backbone system with local gateways with other mail systems at each user center. There is a central X.400/SMTP gateway as well as a format converter between domain-defined and standard-attribute type of addresses. UUCP, BITNET and DECNET mail is converted to SMTP and X.400 at specific sites. There are presently about 100 RedIRIS organizations using the X.400 mail, 66 out of them keep their own MTA(s). The average number of messages/month is now about 9,000, amounting approximately to 45 Mbytes. - X.500 Directory Service. Run as an experimental pilot in coordination with PARADISE Project (COSINE). There are presently 5 DSA based on QUIPU-ISODE. The number of registered organizations is now 99 with more than 5,000 entries. A standard procedure to dump existing information at each organization has been set up to facilitate the inclusion of new entry data. Public software for popular X.500 user interfaces has been announced to RedIRIS organizations to prompt directory use by end users. * TCP/IP ------ TCP/IP based services are mainly used to interconnect the growing number of LANs. RedIRIS global internet network runs over the same ARTIX backbone by means of tunneling over X.25. In June 1992, 40 RedIRIS member organizations reached full IP connectivity. Within the RedIRIS Autonomous System there are now 57 IP connected networks (18 class B, 39 class C). More networks are in the process of getting IP connectivity. The last RIPE DNS Hostcount showed 148 authorized domains under ".es" (many of them are Spanish EUnet customers with only mail and Usenet News) and about 3,800 registered hosts. In practice, only 40 such organizations have properly set up their own DNS server. * New services ------------ Several information services are now being implemented. File servers containing information about network-related features are under deployment. The aim is to help local managers at RedIRIS organizations run their own network services at each specific site. Anonymous FTP and an X.500 Directory are ready available for that purpose. Other user-friendly interfaces such as WAIS and Gopher are under consideration. As to information of a broader scope, RedIRIS has recently started the USENET News Service in cooperation with other national network organizations (SWITCH, DFN, ACOnet), which established early this year a partnership cooperation. At this stage, the RedIRIS News Service is operated as an initial pilot. It is expected to turn it into a stable service at the end of this year. *RedIRIS Director, RedIRIS/Fundesco, Madrid, Spain