Dear colleagues, (Apologies for any duplicate mails). The New Projects group at the RIPE NCC is pleased to announce that 25 new test-boxes have been delivered, tested and are ready to be installed at your site. More test-boxes will be assemble as soon as these 25 machines have been shipped. These test-boxes measure delays and losses on the Internet by sending time-stamped packets to each other. A more detailed description is available in RIPE document 209 (see below). At this moment, we are also moving the Test Traffic Measurements from an experimental product to a regular membership service offered by the RIPE NCC. Under this service, the RIPE NCC will operate the test-box and analyze the measurement data for you. With the introduction of this service, 2 restrictions will be removed: * The TTM service will be available to everybody interested, not just the current LIR members, * Any organization can apply for more than 1 test-box, and, for example, install a box at every major PoP. Another change is that you will have to pay for the hardware of the boxes. A test-box currently costs 2750 Euro. This includes the installation costs, but does not include shipping, taxes and import/export duties. The RIPE NCC has been asked to introduce a service fee (of approximately 3000 Euro/Year) for the operation of the boxes. However, for tax-reasons, it is currently not possible to do this. Therefore: * There will be NO service fee for the remainder of 2000 and the first months of 2001. For those of you familiar with the project, it is worth noticing that the hardware of the boxes has been improved. The most important change is in the design of the antenna. In the new machines, the HF-unit has been moved to the antenna, thus eliminating the need for expensive coax cable between the antenna and the test-box itself. Instead, regular CAT-5 cable can be used and cable lengths of (at least) 200 to 300 meters are possible. Also, the boxes have more CPU and memory available and this feature will be exploited in the future do other measurements and analyze the data on the box, thus reducing the time between data-taking and availability of the results. In short, this means: * Easier installation * More freedom in installing the antennas. If you are interested in hosting a test-box, please start by reading the following documents, all available from the test-traffic web-site at http://www.ripe.net/test-traffic/: * RIPE-209, "Providing Test Traffic Measurements as a membership service". This document describes the model the RIPE-NCC will use for selling the test-boxes and the related service for operating them. * RIPE-214, "General Terms to the RIPE-NCC Test Traffic Measurements and Test-Box Purchase Agreement". This document contains the contract used to sell the test-boxes. It is the translation of RIPE-209 into "legalise". * RIPE-168 (Version 2.1 or later). This is the installation guide for the test-boxes. The current document is somewhat outdated, in particular the section on the antenna installation. An update will be published early November. A document that is presently being written is a "2 page glossy summary" of RIPE-209, describing the advantages of hosting a test-box for your manager. If you are interested in hosting one or more test-boxes, please fill out the application sheet at http://www.ripe.net/test-traffic/Host_testbox. If anything is unclear or you have questions that are not answered in the documents, do not hesitate to contact us. The application procedure has become a little more complex than before, but still shouldn't take much more than a few minutes to complete. Sites that have already expressed interest in hosting a box will be contacted in a separate mail. As announced before, we will give the existing test-box hosts a possibility to upgrade your hardware. This will announced, when we are ready to do this, in a separate mail. There is no deadline for applying. Applications will be processed in the order as they come in and processed as soon as our production schedule permits. If you have any questions about this project, please do not hesitate to contact me. Kind regards, Henk Uijterwaal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Henk Uijterwaal Email: henk.uijterwaal@ripe.net RIPE Network Coordination Centre WWW: http://www.ripe.net/home/henk Singel 258 Phone: +31.20.535-4414, Fax -4445 1016 AB Amsterdam Home: +31.20.4195305 The Netherlands Mobile: +31.6.55861746 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A man can take a train and never reach his destination. (Kerouac, well before RFC2780).