Academic and Research Network of Slovenia - ARNES

Organization

ARNES (The Academic and Research Network of Slovenia) was established as a public institution in May 1992 to provide communication and information services to educational and research community. The members of its Board of Directors are appointed by the Ministry for Science and Technology and by the Ministry for Education and Sport.

Communities to be served

ARNES provides network services to Universities, other Higher Education Institutions and Government Research Institutions. Most of the users are from technical Faculties and big Research Institutions. ARNES tries to introduce network services also in other parts of the Educational and Research Community of Slovenia.

Funding

All activites are funded by the Ministry for Science and Technology.

Scope of work

ARNES has been established to develop, organize and manage the academic and research network in Slovenia. For this purpose ARNES:

• plans, organizes and manages the connections between the organizations from academic and research area,
• plans, organizes and manages the connections with other countries,
• develops, organizes and supervises computer network services and manages and performs the necessary central activities together with the purchase of necessary hardware, software and communication equipment,
• organizes and carries out the appropriate supporting, educational and counselling activities,
• manages the address space in computer networks (under the country code SI).

Protocols and services

ARNES provides the national backbone: the organizations do not need to look for the connections with all other organizations - it is enough for them to get the connection to the national backbone. This national bacbone is a multiprotocol one: the protocols on the network level are X.25, ISO IP and DECnet Phase IV.
ARNES provides certain number of services to institutions connected to it. Three groups of services are supported at the moment: ISO OSI services, Internet services and DECnet services:

• for remote login: telnet, X.29 and set host,
• for electronic mail: X.400, SMTP and Mail-11,
• for file transfer: ftp and DECne COPY,
• for electronic directory: X.500
• for bulletin board systems: news and notes
• other information services: access to Archie, WAIS and WWW servers.

International activity

ARNES is fully integrated in pan-european activities in academic and research networking.

1. ARNES is a Full National Member of TERENA (The Association of European networking organizations). TERENA fosters the cooperation between its members to develop a harmonized computer communications infrastructure in Europe.
2. ARNES is a shareholder in DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe Limited). DANTE was established as an organization which cares about the pan-european backbone and services which must be done centrally for the whole Europe.
3. ARNES participates in the PARADISE project. This project tries to set up an international X.500 directory service.
4. ARNES participates in RIPE activities where the coordination between european IP networks is done.

Conclusion

The main task of ARNES is the development, operation and management of the communication and information network for education and research. The objective is to promote and enhance national and international cooperation in the field of teaching and research with the most up-to-date means of communication available. ARNES follows the progress in protocols and services in this area. ARNES actively promotes international standards and avoids being limited to any one computer and communication supplier. The priority is given to services and user support.