Announcement of new Russian connectivity

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Mon, 07 Feb 94 20:26:25 -0800
From: "Milo S. Medin" (NASA ARC NSI Office) <medin () nsipo nasa gov>




Folks, as some of you may know, NASA (through the NASA Science Internet
Office) has been working to establish full Internet access to several sites
in the Moscow (Russia) region for some time.  As part of that process, an export
control license was granted to the NSIO for the router and communications
equipment needed to establish this connection, and to explicitly provision
general purpose Internet access to these Russian facilities in support
of NASA programs.


As part of this export control license, NSIO agreed to generally announce
this connectivity before it was actually to be opened to the generic
Internet community, and to work with any network provider to block routing
and generally restrict network access to it's customers which may wish to
have such blocking done.  This does not necessarily obligate NSI to actually
filter packets to or from any specific destination, but to work to block routing
in an appropriate manner.


Network service providers may want to notify their sites that several facilities
in Moscow will soon have direct Internet access, and that if they do
not want such access to established, to have you notify us of that desire.
Note that several Russian and former Soviet Union sites already have
direct (albeit slower speed) Internet access, and that blocking of direct access
still leaves open the possibility for a Russian user to connect to an
intermediate host that has such connectivity enabled, and then to hop to their
site.  Nonetheless, we are still explicitly required by the terms of the export
control license to make this offer.


A little about the details of the connectivity.  A 256 Kbps link has been
provisioned between NSI's network facilities at the Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, MD, to the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI)
in Moscow.  At that site, a hub router has been enplaced with tail circuits
to about a dozen other facilities, each with routers terminating the links
at the remote sites. This distribution network is called the Russian Space
Science Internet, or RSSI.  They have recieved a block of class C
network addresses (193.232.0 - 192.232.31) for use in the Moscow area.


At this time, the 256 Kbps trunk to the United States is now on line
and operational, and 2 of the LAN's at IKI are connected, and we
expect some of the tail sites to be coming online shortly.  The nets
have been sent to Merit for configuration in the PRDB system, and have
been added or will soon be added to the routing databases in the NSFnet
routers, as well as NSI direct peering with various other networks, but
Russian routing not yet actually enabled through the NSI system.  Barring
any unexpected problems, or any negative outcry from the network community,
we expect to turn this on and finally establish full connectivity by the end
of the week.


If any organization would like to work to block access to these networks,
please send me (medin () nsipo nasa gov) electronic mail, and we will work
with you and your network provider to establish such filtering.  Thank you for
your cooperation.


                                                Milo Medin
                                                Manager, Network Systems Group
                                                NASA Ames Research Center