COLLABORATORY WORKSHOP TECHNOLOGY DEMONSTRATIONS

MBONE

The MBONE, short for Multicast backBONE, is a logical, multicast based network for carrying audio, video, and shared presentation media over the Internet. The MBONE is an outgrowth of the first two Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) "audiocast" experiments in which live audio and video were multicast from the IETF meeting site to destinations around the world. The idea is to construct a semi-permanent IP multicast testbed to carry the IETF transmissions and support continued experimentation between meetings. This is a cooperative, volunteer effort. The MBONE is a virtual network. It is layered on top of portions of the physical Internet to support routing of IP multicast packets since that function has not yet been integrated into many production routers. The network is composed of islands that can directly support IP multicast, such as multicast LANs like Ethernet, linked by virtual point-to-point links called "tunnels". The tunnel endpoints are typically workstation-class machines having operating system support for IP multicast and running the "mrouted" multicast routing daemon. For more information, use FTP to retreive the MBONE Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file: ftp.es.net:/pub/public-domain/conferencing/ftp.ee.lbl.gov/faq.txt A collection of MBONE source code and utilities is available: ftp.es.net:/pub/public-domain/conferencing/*

VIRTUAL NOTEBOOK SYSTEM

The Virtual Notebook System (VNS) was developed at the Baylor School of Medicine and is now a product of The ForeFront Group. The VNS system allows you to store text and image "objects" on "pages" that are arranged into virtual "notebooks". These notebooks can be shared with other people across platforms - changes are updated on every computer viewing the page. Data is stored on a Unix server, and clients to view the data are available for PC, Mac, and Unix systems. The VNS system supports two other objects that make it more than a replica of a paper notebook - hypertext links to other pages (or to a different place on the same page), and action links which can run external programs. A C programming interface exists to allow you to access and manipulate pages programatically. VNS is designed as a collaborative group work tool. Access to individual notebooks can restricted; read/write and read-only access can be assigned for each individual. The demonstration is intended to provide you an idea of the capabilities available in electronic notebooks and how they might help you keep track of experiments or other information. It consists of an integrated Laboratory Notebook example using a PNL developed PC Windows data acquisition program that logs images (data graphs, configuration screenshots, etc.) and metadata (filename, date/time stamp, comments, user name, etc.) to a notebook that can be accessed from a Mac (or Sun or PC).

NCSA MOSAIC

NCSA Mosaic is an Internet information browser and World Wide Web client. NCSA Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. NCSA Mosaic is copyrighted but free for academic and research use. NCSA Mosaic comes in three flavors: X Window System, Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows. UNIX X Window System binaries are currently available for: DEC Alpha OSF/1 version 1.3; DEC MIPS Ultrix 4.0; HP 9000/730 HP-UX 9.01; IBM RS/6000 AIX 3.2.4, X11R5; SGI IRIX 5.1.x; SGI IRIX 4.0.x; Sun Solaris 2.3; Sun SunOS 4.1.3. NCSA httpd is a HTTP/1.0 compatible server for making hypertext and other documents available to Web browsers such as Mosaic. The current version is 1.1. This code is in the public domain. You can retrieve copies of NCSA Mosaic viewers and httpd server in both source and executable binary form from NCSA's anonymous FTP server: ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu:Mosaic/*