Belnet (the Belgian

National research and education network A national research and education network (NREN) is a specialised internet service provider dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education communities within a country. It is usually distinguished by support for a high-speed backb ...

) is a Belgian internet provider for educational institutions, research centres, scientific institutes and government services. Since 1993, BELNET provides web services to higher education, federal departments and ministries, and international organisations. Since 2001, Belnet provides

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

connectivity and

multicast In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...

access to its customers. One of Belnet's

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

servers is a mirror for holding several files related to the

FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies *Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company * Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway *Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), United ...

and

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

communities, as well as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

distros such as

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

, Gentoo, and

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...

. Since 2004, Belnet is the operator of BEgrid, the Belgian research grid infrastructure, and since 2009 it is also the operator of the BEgrid Portal (based on

P-GRADE Portal The P-GRADE Grid Portal was software for web portals to manage the life-cycle of executing a parallel application in grid computing. It was developed by the MTA SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at the Hungarian Aca ...

technology). On 4 and 5 May 2021, Belnet was subject to a massive

DDOS attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack A cyberattack is any offensive maneuver that targets computer information systems, computer networks, infrastructures, or personal computer devices. An attacker is a p ...

that disrupted the accessibility of websites using the

.be .be is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Belgium. As of November 2022 there are 1,746,459 registered domains. History The domain became active in 1989 and was administrated by Pierre Verbaeten of the Katholieke Universiteit ...

domain, including those of the Belgian government, parliament, police, educational and research institutions, health care, and public broadcasters, forcing the postponement of parliamentary hearings relating to the

Uyghur genocide The Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang that is often characterized as genocide. Since 2014, the Chinese government, under the a ...

References

External links

*
Cisco et BELNET accélèrent le trafic Internet belgeBELNET développe les services de protection informatiqueGridguide : BELNETBEGridBEmadsP-GRADE Portal
Internet in Belgium Internet mirror services Internet service providers of Belgium National research and education networks {{Web-stub