On December 11th, a major fiber cut on Oahu affected our primary Internet and Internet2 connection through Verizon. The secondary Internet link through Time Warner was up but not all Internet sites were reachable.
Between December 22 and 23, there were intermittent network outages to and from the Big Island due to a faulty fiber link between West Hawaii and Oahu.
In summary:
David Lassner will look into providers that can provide light paths from Spencer Beach through an intermediate point at Mauna Lani to CFHT at Waimea and to Hilo. We might start with two light paths from Spencer Beach to Mauna Lani - one for connection to the US mainland and one for connection to Australia - and one light path from Mauna Lani to Waimea. However, the provider will be expected to be able to provide expansion of one additional light path between Spencer Beach and Mauna Lani for direct connection to Oahu, and a few additional light paths from Mauna Lani to Waimea and Hilo.
Bill St Arnaud of CANARIE and Mark Prior of AARNet were to come up with equipment plans.
Dennis Crabtree and Will Kastelic of NRC will prepare the CANARIE proposal.
Pui Hin Rhoads will upgrade the link between Hilo and the summit to 100mbps.
Following the report on the CFHT meeting, there was a discussion on how we can fund the leg from Waimea to Hilo and the upgrade to GE to the summit without additional cost for the observatories.
Pui Hin suggested if we can all share bandwidth rather than having private links between summit and base camps, we might be able to afford bigger pipes with the same cost. Using VLAN Trunk Protocol (VTP), multiple VLAN traffic can be carried over a single link. This enables observatories to preserve private subnets and administrative domains.
For equipment to support dormitory Internet connections, Pui Hin suggested Cisco 100 mbps switches with fiber uplinks, for each dormitory B, C, and D. In the main building, Pui Hin recommended a Cisco 3750 multilayer switch with four GE capable fiber interfaces. This switch will provide connections to the dormitory buildings with a spare port for future upgrade of the summit switch network.
The problem with outgoing email on the DHCP network at HP was brought up by Henry Stilmack. Because the DHCP network is an IfA owned subnet, email messages sent from laptops on this subnet will normally not be relayed by the observatories' mailservers. The use of VPN, webmail, and SMTP Authentication were discussed.
Thomas Cooper suggested that a similar secondary server in Hilo will be useful. Pui Hin said it could be done and will set it up in the near future.
Pui Hin also reminded everyone that UH-ITS will set up their servers as secondaries for observatories that want to use the service.
Pui Hin will talk to Ron Koehler about putting signs up to remind people to keep their cell phones off above HP.