This is the external wiki for the GEANT task “Campus Best Practices”, or CBP for short. CBP started its work in GN3 as part of EU's seventh framework and ran from April 1 2009 till March 31 2013. CBP continued in the GN3plus project running from April 1 2013 until April 30 2015. The GN4 project Phase1 has started on May 1 2015 and it will continue until April 30 2016.
The GN4 project consists of several activities which in turn are divided into a number of tasks. NA3 (Network Activity 3) is named “Status and Trends” and contains four tasks, where Task 2 is “Campus Best Practices”.
Contacts
Activity leader for NA3: John Dyer, TERENA
Task leader for NA3T2: Jari Miettinen, CSC/Funet
Task co-leader: Vanessa Pierné, RENATER
Contributing NRENs to NA3T2:
Web
Objectives
The overall objectives are to address key challenges for the European campus networks, organise working groups and provide an evolving and to-the-point set of best-practice documents for the community.
The task aims to challenge individual Research and Education Networking organisations to reinforce their national efforts in promoting best practices in campus networking. Better synchronisation of efforts at the national level of research networking and on campus is essential for viable end-to-end services. Another target is to find the means to develop and maintain national best-practice recommendations. As in the Norwegian GigaCampus project, an IETF-style working model can be considered for the working groups in the countries served by the pilot NRENs (see below). Dissemination of results at European-wide workshops and conferences is important.
Read more... (17 page PDF, November 2011)
Work Plan
The Task will address national campus coordination activities, analogous to what has been achieved in the GigaCampus project run by UNINETT, the Norwegian NREN organisation.
The national set-ups in the countries served by the member NRENs will be along the following lines:
Each NREN will in its country take the necessary initiatives and coordinate the activities for the different technical areas. Focus areas are physical infrastructure, campus networking, mobility, security, network monitoring and real-time communications. Participants from the relevant technical units at the universities are invited to working groups, which will work to propose recommendations. Agreements in these working groups will be based on rough consensus (the “IETF model”).
As part of the working group activity, training and workshops will take place at national, regional and local level, depending on the subject concerned. Trainers will be experts from the working groups and industry experts.
As the results and recommendations from the countries of the member NRENs become available, they will be actively disseminated to the wider European NREN and campus communities. Recommendations and experiences will be laid down in best-practice documents, which will be translated if needed and be disseminated throughout Europe. NREN and campus staff involved in the work in the countries of the member NRENs will present the results of the work at suitable events, e.g. the GN4 Project Symposia, the TERENA Networking Conferences, EUNIS conferences and national research networking conferences in various European countries. When other NRENs want to set up similar national structures and activities, the member NRENs will provide support and advice.
The dissemination efforts will be reported in the annual reports from this Task.
The Task will provide technical background material for possible joint procurements of groups of universities, based on the consensus on recommendations and requirements achieved in the Task, thereby increasing their purchasing power and reducing duplication of work.
Technical focus areas
These are the six areas agreed upon for GN3plus Year 1 and Year 2. Each area has an icon which is used at www.geant.net/cbp. Areas may/will be revised for GN4.
Physical infrastructure: This area addresses the requirements for generic cabling systems on campus, both fibre and twisted pair. The requirements of the infrastructure in telecommunications and server rooms are also dealt with. This includes power supply, ventilation and cooling, and fire protection, as well as general ICT room-plan guidelines. Recommendations for building an audio-visual (AV) infrastructure in lecture halls and meeting rooms are also covered.
Campus networking. This area deals with the campus network itself, with the routers and switches as its basic building blocks. Requirements to both Layer 2 and Layer 3 are covered. Recommendations for a redundant design are given. There is a particular emphasis on guidelines for implementing IPv6 on campus. Lightpaths on campus are also dealt with.
Wireless: This area focuses on the wireless infrastructure on campus. Radio planning, design of the wireless network, security considerations, including the implementation of IEEE 802.1X are covered. eduroam requirements and radius setup are dealt with. Cookbooks for controller-based implementations are given. Legal aspects are examined.
Network monitoring: This area focuses on network monitoring of the campus network. General requirements and framework conditions for monitoring are given. NetFlow/IPFIX analysis is covered. Security monitoring, anomaly detection and behaviour analysis are also dealt with. Particular considerations for IPv6 monitoring are given. References to a number of open source tools are given, many of which have been developed within the GÉANT community.
Real-time communications: This area recommends infrastructures for real-time communications with an emphasis on open standards, and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), in particular. The infrastructure itself should be media transparent, coping with voice, video, messaging, document sharing, and presence. Particular focus is given to Voice over IP (VoIP) and IP telephony. Best practices from a number of NRENs in Europe are given. Security concerns are discussed and implemented solutions are recommended. Performance issues are also covered.
Security: This area deals with security considerations for the campus network. A template for a security policy is proposed, based on core principles, as defined in ISO/IEC 27002. An ICT security architecture for higher education is recommended. Traffic filtering technologies are discussed and general applications are recommended. Adoption of digital certificates in a public key infrastructure (PKI) is covered.