CARNet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
CARNet is the Croatian Academic and Research Network (Croatian: Hrvatska akademska i istraživačka mreža).
The network was founded in 1991 by the ministry of science and technology, and the institution officially came to life in 1995 when the government decreed so. CARNet's mission is to "provide the infrastructure, knowledge and the necessary resources to individuals and organizations that wish to build Croatia as an information society".
CARNet's activities include the development and maintenance of the national academic network system, connecting with international networks, building network infrastructure within the country, and everything else that involves IT. The activities of CARNet are closely intertwined with those of SRCE, the University Computing Centre in Zagreb.
CARNet maintains the DNS database for the Croatian top-level domain .hr and maintains the public network time protocol (NTP) servers. It maintains and connects the internets for Croatia's six universities and all other government-funded or non-profit organizations in the country. SRCE operates the CARNet NOC as well as the DNS registry. CARNet also includes the computer security agency C-CERT, and it has founded the Internet exchange point CIX (which has since been made into a separate entity, run by SRCE).
The core of the CARNet network in Zagreb is 10GE, the backbone links connecting Zagreb with Split and Rijeka are GE, those connecting Varaždin and Osijek to Zagreb are STM-1, as are those connecting Zadar and Dubrovnik to Split and Pula to Rijeka. The bulk of the other links with cities are E1s, although the situation is evolving on a regular basis. The international connection is a pair of STM-4 links to the local GÉANT PoP, which in turn has a pair of STM-16 links to the rest of the European network.
CARNet is also an ISP for the academic community (professors, students etc), as well as for the educational community (school staff and pupils), and it maintains all the resources a typical ISP does, like a news server (NNTP), an IRC server, FTP and mirroring servers, mailing lists. It also helps build the authentication and authorization infrastructure through the AAI@EduHr project, which links LDAP directories, PGP keyrings, etc.
CARNet initiated and/or sponsored a variety of unique projects: for example the "first" web page in the country, www.hr, a national search engine, and a set of progressive web sites built for the tenth anniversary of the Internet in Croatia.
