How to hook an Onet site up to the Internet: - If your organization doesn't have an official IP network number assigned already, fill out the "NETINFO:INTERNET-NUMBER-TEMPLATE.TXT" form and send it in to hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa. Ignore pt 1 since you are not connecting to the DARPA or DDN Internet (you are connecting to a regional network attached to NSFnet). If your organization is non-trivial, ask for a Class B network; you'll likely need it in the future. Before even thinking about proceeding, change all the internal hosts that want to access the rest of Onet or points beyond to use addresses in your assigned network. - After you physically hook up to Onet, make sure IP routing works with the other Onet sites and to the Internet. This is the responsibility of the network person looking after your Onet link, who may have to coordinate with liaisons at UofT and elsewhere. - Once you can telnet and ftp across the Internet, you can start worrying about hooking up your organization to the Internet, and vice versa. You need to set up the name servers for your organization. If you are running a nameserver on a UNIX host, fetch a recent version of the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) from somewhere. The canonical copy is kept on ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (128.32.130.11/128.32.137.8), retrievable by anonymous FTP (**) as 4.3/bind.4.8.tar.Z. A more recent version and probably the basis for future BINDs is retrievable from ai.toronto.edu (128.100.1.65) as pub/utbind.tar.Z. Install BIND. - Once your nameserver can speak to the Internet nameservers, and you have set up your own organization-internal data so you can use it to your satisfaction, it is time to let the rest of the world know you exist and are reachable. Before you do that, you need to scrounge around for a secondary server for your data. The ideal secondary is far away from Onet and strategically well-located in the topology of the Internet. The reason for this is to minimize the effect of you being cut off from the Internet. In older versions of Sendmail, if it couldn't reach an authoritative nameserver it would bounce the mail. The software has become more robust over time. There is a host at UofT that used to be on the ARPAnet and hence was a very good choice for a secondary. It has since lost its ARPAnet connection with the deprecation of that network, but it still provides secondary service to several Onet sites. There is a small advantage to us in that, because it is also a 'fake root' server and we use it as a super caching server so the more information it has, the better. At UofT we run a couple of these fake-root-super-caches, and half a dozen on-campus secondaries for our 30-40 (?) organizational subdomains. - Now it is time to tell the world about yourself. Get ahold of the "NETINFO:IHOST-TEMPLATE.TXT" file. You should pick the one or two most important hosts at your organization and enter them into the HOSTS.TXT file (by filling out and submitting this form to hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa). If you have a non-.CA domain name, they require that the nameserver host has an entry in the HOSTS.TXT file. If your organizational domain is a subdomain of .CA, contact whichever network liaison you registered through and ask them to modify your registration form to show: Forwarder: Internet: none (all hosts are Internet); Also give them the official host names and network addresses of the nameservers for your organizational domain, and ask to arrange for the authoritative CA nameservers to point at whatever you specified for your domain. Your nameservers *must* be ready to go before you do this. Telling the Internet about your domain isn't enough though, you also need to let the world know how to discover the hostname attached to a particular IP address within your assigned network. This is what the strange IN-ADDR.ARPA domain is for. If you take the network portion of your network number, reverse the octets and append this magic domain, that is another ``domain'' you need to arrange nameservice and proper data for. For example, UofT is 128.100.0.0, we told the world about our authoritative 100.128.IN-ADDR.ARPA nameservers. This must go through hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa, and they will require HOSTS.TXT entries for all the nameservers you specify. Send mail to onet-workers saying you're online and ready, and let us know which hosts in your organization we might be interested in adding to our hosts files. Personally I'd prefer if you mailed it in the proper format so I can just edit it into the UofT hosts file. A few hosts per organization is OK, but don't overdo it. - You'll find out really quickly when the information has been updated and leaked to the rest of the Internet, because Internet mail will likely start arriving at your doorstep. You should expect to be on call during this period to deal with any problems interfacing your mailers or nameservers to the Internet. The one deadly sin is for your nameservers to leak information that can affect other organizations or the operation of other people's nameservers. Once again, your own data must be clean and ready for use. - Now that you're all hooked up to the Internet, then what??? First of all, keep in mind that resources are limited, and the primary (stated) purpose of you being on Onet is to net-work with other Onet members. The exact limits are vague and prone to politics so I'll stay away from that issue, but here are some common-sense points: - there are several archives already on Onet, often complete and uptodate copies of archives elsewhere on the Internet or providing unique resources not found elsewhere on the net. Get to know them. If you want to specialize in providing some particular software or information, announce it to people (via the onet-workers list). This serves two purposes: a) sanity check in case someone else is already doing it, b) informational so the other admins know where to look for whatever you're keeping. - don't cause the same data to be brought over several times via the longdistance links -- both within Onet and to the rest of the Internet. The worst occurrence of this so far was the day X.V11R3 was released, both some people at UofT and at UW were bringing it over from uunet.uu.net at the same time over the same links, all 40 Megabytes. They eventually discovered each other, but after a lot of bandwidth had been wasted. Coordinate via onet-workers or ont.archives or some such. The same argument goes for netnews transmission (follow network topology), mailing lists (both UofT and UW get lots of these, I know we feed them into newsgroups here). - your Onet membership is for Your organization. Unless you have a direct working (or some other close) relationship with a non-Onet site, don't assume they have any rights to make use of Onet resources. At least, we can't, so I assume you can't either. Politics abounds in this area if it becomes an issue, so don't make it an issue. If you're wondering, I'm referring to you acting as Internet forwarders for random sites, or start gatewaying mail to your local area in a way that is drastically different from existing traffic patterns. Quick guide: Be sure you're on the onet-workers@{utai.uucp,ai.toronto.edu,ai.utoronto.ca} mailing list. You can grab archives by anonymous FTP to neat.ai.toronto.edu (128.100.1.65) in lists/onet-workers. Requests to onet-workers-request@.... Anonymous FTP is a convention. Hosts that support it will allow you to log in with the user id 'anonymous' and any nonnull password, but it is good etiquette to give your own login id as the password. If you install a recent FTP, you can get the application to do this for you automatically. By anonymous FTP to 128.100.1.65 you can also fetch the documents mentioned above (remember to set image/binary mode transfer), namely netinfo/internet-number-template.Z, and netinfo/ihost-template.Z netinfo/hosts.Z and perhaps the intro documents from Rutgers U and UIUC in info/onet/* The extension .Z means the file is in 'compress' format and needs to be uncompressed before you can read it. Any Sun and most new UNIX machines has this program. Note that the AI host keeps complete shadow copies of the major network info directories at sri-nic.arpa, and they are updated automatically every night. Avoid using the Internet link to grab stuff if you can get it from inside Onet. rayan