Internet Protocol Forum

Contents:

From the Editor
Cloud Computing
SSH
Book Review
Fragments
 

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In our last issue we brought you Part 1 of a two-part article on Cloud Computing. T. Sridhar introduced various aspects of cloud computing, including the rationale, underlying models, and infrastructures. Part 2, subtitled “Infrastructure and Implementation Topics,” is included in the current issue. Cloud computing has received a great deal of press in recent months and continues to be an area of rapid development. I’m confident that we will have more articles about this topic in future editions of IPJ.

With this issue we start a new series of articles under the general heading “Protocol Basics.” The idea is to present a series of in-depth tutorials on numerous protocols that are used every day on the Internet and in enterprise networks. The articles will cover protocol details as well as implementation, deployment, and usage scenarios. In some cases the articles will also summarize the “lessons learned” and present “best-practice” guidelines. To start the series, we asked Bill Stallings to give us an overview of the Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol. We invite you to send us suggestions for other protocols that you’d like to see covered in this series.

Today’s Internet is a result of many years of technological development and innovative uses of the resulting infrastructure. Of equal importance has been many policy choices made over the years, ranging from what protocols to use to how to allocate finite resources such as the IPv4 address space. A new book, Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance, explores some of this history. The book is examined in an extended review by Tom Vest.

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by T. Sridhar

Cloud computing is an emerging area that affects IT infrastructure, network services, and applications. In Part 1 [0] of this two-part article, we introduced various aspects of cloud computing, including the rationale, underlying models, and infrastructures. In Part 2 we discuss specific infrastructure aspects of cloud computing in detail, specifically:

• Network Infrastructure
• Cloud-to-Cloud and Federation Considerations
• Security

In addition, we will provide some perspective on select topics in cloud computing that have garnered interest. Remember that cloud computing is an emerging area where approaches to some of these topics are still evolving. In addition, although cloud computing is not intrinsically dependent upon virtualization, there is common agreement that virtualization (specifically, server virtualization) will be an integral part of cloud-computing solutions of the future. Consider the discussion in the following sections in this context. (more…)

by William Stallings

Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol is a protocol for secure network communications designed to be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement. The initial version, SSH1, focused on providing a secure remote logon facility to replace Telnet and other remote logon schemes that provided no security [4]. SSH also provides a more general client-server capability and can be used to secure such network functions as file transfer and e-mail. A new version, SSH2, provides a standardized definition of SSH and improves on SSH1 in numerous ways. SSH2 is documented as a proposed standard in RFCs 4250 through 4256 [1–3], [5–8]. (more…)

Protocol Politics

Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance, by Laura DeNardis, MIT Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-26204257-4.

In Protocol Politics, Dr. Laura DeNardis assembles a variety of stories gleaned from official and unofficial Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) records and firsthand accounts, and supplements them with primer-level descriptions of successive generations of Internet addressing and routing protocols to create a broadly accessible overview of the factors that have shaped the present and evolving state of these most central features of Internet technology. (more…)

Colitti and Kline Receive First Itojun Service Award

The first Itojun Service Award was presented at the recent IETF meeting in Hiroshima, Japan to Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline of Google for their outstanding contributions to the development and deployment of IPv6. (more…)