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APANA Sydney Network Overview

The Sydney region of APANA occupies 3 class C (8 bit) IPv4 netblocks allocted to APANA by APNIC. These netblocks are then further divided into 3 or 4 bit subnets for individual member's use via dedicated connections.

Click to see our Core Network Layout

The hub site is located at Petersham (in Sydney's inner-west) and this site contains the equipment that comprises our core network.

The equipment includes several standalone machines (see below) along with an array of networking equipment that's described here:

• - Several banks of Netcomm ProRack analog rack-based modems and associated Telstra PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) lines for member's dedicated IP connections,
• - ADSL equipment for our primary data connection to Iinet,
• - ISDN routers for links to some larger private member networks (including ORBnet in which our primary member-access site for members using non-dedicated dial-up connections is located), along with associated Telstra ISDN lines and related interfacing units.

The primary data connection is a 1500/256 Kbps business-grade ADSL service provided by Iinet. A dedicated ADSL router from D-Link interfaces between our core network and the ADSL DSLAM equipment in Telstra's exchange at Petersham.

The ADSL service is delivered as PPPoA (PPP over ATM), which has an overhead of between 10 to 15 percent. This means that the actual maximum speed of the ADSL connection is 10 to 15 percent under the advertised rates of 1.5 Mbps downstream and 256 Kbps upstream.

The standalone machines at the hub are:

Goliath:
Goliath is the main server at the hub. It manages the primary WWW proxy server, the primary Usenet newsgroup server, email storage and forwarding for all members. It s also our primary domain-name server.

Sprout:
Sprout is the remote access server that manages all analog modem dedicated connections used by members.

Ion:
Ion is a dedicated bandwitdh management system that manages traffic flow over our primary ADSL connection. This machine utilises the QoS (Quality of Service) management features in the Debian Linux kernel to limit the flow of data in each direction so it never exceeds the advertised rate minus the PPPoA overhead in each direction so data buffers in the telco DSLAM equipment are not flooded.

These machines run Linux as their operating system.

Should you have any difficulties using the services on the hub and suspect a software or hardware failure at the hub, please go to the member support page and read the notes there.