It’s hip2b2

Ah yes, the Philippine Internet is now 12 years old. An event was sponsored by the Philippine Internet Commerce Society at the Makati Sports Club to mark this event. Speaking of marc, he gave a talk on Search Engine Marketing in this event which I wished I could have attended.

Anyway, I got hit by a bit of nostalgia after reading the postings of Migs and Yuga. So, I will add a bit of my own.

When people talk about Internet history in the Philippines, people tend to talk about Internet Service Providers, the domain name politics and who was the first in what. Let me discuss a small part of the Philippine Internet, Internet in the Ateneo. Internet in the Ateneo will officially be 13 years old this coming June.

The start of it all is a bit hazy to me. But, it was well described in the “About PHNet website”:

In June 1993, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) convened a Technical Committee composed of representatives from DOST (MIS, PCASTRD, and ASTI), Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU), De La Salle University (DLSU), and the University of the Philippines at Diliman (UPD) and University of the Philippines at Los Banos (UPLB), to study the viability of establishing such a network.

Phase 1 of the DOST project began in July 1993 with a limited electronic facility linking DOST, ADMU, DLSU, and UPD. Local data were transferred from one institution to the other with the use of UUCP. Victoria University of Technology (VUT) in Australia, through the institutional ties with ADMU, became the gateway to the Internet while ADMU acted as the local relay hub for the Philippines.

At this point, we had a bunch of DEC Alpha Servers (mostly DEC Alpha 2100) generously donated as part of this project by the DOST. These were running OSF Unix. The servers were named after favorite Filipino “pulutan” such as Balut, Pusit, Sisig and Pata. (These servers go well with the Asia-Pacific College servers such as Carlsberg and Heineken). I do not know who actually named these servers but Ritchie Lozada (Unix admin turned Microsoft Advocate) might.

At some point, Ateneo needed additional bandwidth and bought it from a company called Planet Internet (which was later bought out by Mozcom). Since then, the Ateneo has been a loyal Mozcom customer.

At this time, Fiber optic cable was being rolled-out around the campus. Being located in an open air high altitude location, it was common to have lightning current run on the original unversity copper plant. So the network planners of that day deployed a Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) network. The nodes of the original FDDI network were Faura Hall, Xavier Hall, Rizal Library and the Gonzaga Hall using primarily CISCO Catalyst equipment. Core services in the University network were still run using some of the old DEC Alpha servers and some newer Intel-based servers running a mix of Linux and MS Windows.

By 1997, the Internet needs of the University have increased significantly. From originally just email for a few people, the University was getting used to the idea of the Internet. Most of the faculty members couldn’t stand having no access to their email. Web surfing use was growing. Unix talk was now being used for dating. Multi-User Dungeons were now the favorite passtime of a lot of science majors. There was one installed in Balut and one in the residence hall server. The original FDDI network of the campus network was buckling under the increased local network access (or most likely due to wear and tear). Plans were underway to build a new local area network.

By 1999, the Ateneo deploys one of the country’s first Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network using Forerunner (LE-155, ES-3810 and ES-2810) switches. The ATM network operates on LAN Emulation (LANE) mode. The ATM network is still the core of the Ateneo Campus Network up to this day. With better local area network speed, it was crutial to maximize Internet traffic within the University and conserve costly external Internet bandwidth. A move to harden the core network infrastructure of the Ateneo was begun. A multi-node HTTP web caching system was deployed using Linux and Squid Web Caching software on mostly Intel Pentium II hardware. A hardened electronic mail system was also deployed using Linux and Postfix email software. A subneting scheme was designed to conserve rare global IP addresses by using NAT and caching. These moves were spearhead by Dr. Ben Yumol and Dr. Pierre Tagle. During this period, a group dedicated to the maintenance of the University network was born. This was called Ateneo Campus Network Group.

In the meantime, the college dormitories (Cervini and Eliazo Halls) were building a local area network with their own funds. This local area network is connected to the campus network via 100baseFX Fast Ethernet connection. Due to the university’s shortage of IP addresses, the dormintory was forced to do network address translation (NAT). However, the dormers did not have the funds to buy an expensive CISCO router. So they resorted to installing Linux on an old Intel Pentium Classic with 64 mb RAM server. This was a 120MHz machine under clocked to 75Mhz to allow it to run cooler. This effort was primarily lead by dormers once of which was Richard Quisumbing. A group of dormers (Mark Soriano, Jess Uy, Nowd Cheng-Chua and myself) together with the dorm administration (Tim Gabuna) decided to build a permanent cabling infrastructure in the dorms. By August 1999, the Ateneo Cervini-Eliazo Networks (ACENT) was the first in-house college dormitory in country with structure network cabling (140 nodes) and its own network management team. Up to today, this infrastructure is still in use and has been extended with WiFi APs to allow more dormers to get Internet connectivity. It is now lead by a new breed of ACENT team members.

In 2003, a new Gigabit Ethernet backbone was deployed in the PLDT Convergent Technology Center (PLDT-CTC). This network is primarily powered with 3com equipment. The PLDT-CTC is also connected to existing campus network with a gigabit backhaul to Faura Hall.

Also in 2003, the Ateneo with a generous donation from Microsoft (approx. 200 Microsoft wireless access points) builds a campus-wide Wireless LAN network. This is over and above the small wireless network deployed with Nokia-donated equipment in 2000. This network initially covered the college cluster, Faura hall and the Cafeteria. Today, it also covers the dormitory, the Science Education Complex, the Humanities Complex and the Library. This project was sprear-headed by the Ateneo Campus Network Group under Mr. Patrick Medina.

Today, the campus is actively pursuing an upgrade of its PSTN facilities by deploying newer Voice-over-IP capable technology. It is also continuing the expand its Wireless LAN coverage. This year’s graduation was even streamed over the Internet for the very first time. New applications are being planned for introduction to the campus network with the creation of the PLDT-Ateneo Network Testbed. The campus network continues its evolution.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 7:32 am and is filed under Web, Academics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.