MINUTES FOR NOVEMBER 9, 1994 IAB TELECONFERENCE

PRESENT:

Brian Carpenter
Robert Elz
Phill Gross
Christian Huitema
Jon Postel
Yakov Rekhter
Dave Sincoskie
Abel Weinrib
Lixia Zhang

NEXT MEETING:

Friday December 9, 7:00 AM — 12:00 noon during San Jose IETF meeting.

ACTION ITEMS:

NEW ACTION ITEMS:

• Dave Sincoskie: Call Tony Rutkowski to see if he will take on ownership of the Internet usage survey.

• Christian Huitema, Jon Postel and Steve Crocker: Write statement re. “branding” RFCs with a protocol number and creation of a web page to support this.

• Christain Huitema: Get final text of liason document from Stev Knowles and publish it.

• Lixia Zhang: Review DOD versions of the IETF standards documents.

OLD ACTION ITEMS:

• Dave Sincoskie: Follow up on standardizing S/key within the IETF. Lixia Zhang: Ask end-to-end group for their advice on how to measure the “performance” of an internet. Dave Sincoskie and Paul Mockapetris: Organize a BOF on internet performance measurement at the next IETF. Jon Postel (IANA): Report on problems with the current DNS registry process and possible solutions. Christian Huitema: Follow up with Tony Rutkowski on Internet usage survey.

• Lixia Zhang, Yakov Rekhter and Phill Gross: Write discussion paper on the impact of commercialization on the Internet.

• Christian Huitema: Write discussion paper on the integration of services and its impact on usage and models of usage.

• Yakov Rekhter: Revise RFC 1560.

• Christian Huitema and Steve Crocker: prepare a brief note outlining follow-up to security retreat.

• Yakov Rekhter: Prepare a review of “routing architecture for a multi-provider, international internet.”

NOTES:

1. Agree on agenda.

2. Review of outstanding action items.

3. II Workshop followup

Reports are being written by John Romkey and Karen Sollins. They hope to complete the sections and integrate them soon. ,p>
There will be a presentation by John Romkey during an IETF plenary session on the results of the workshop.

4. Brands of RFCs

During the last IESG conference call the point was raised that having all RFCs in the same series can cause confusion. Should a structure be put on them to distinguish standards from other documents?

The basic problem is that many people don’t realize that not all RFCs are standards–thus allowing apparent end-runs around the standards process by publishing informational RFCs that do not reflect community consensus. The banner on the front page does not help because neither a salesman nor a customer will have the document in front of them.

Jon Postel stated that he believes that the community benefits from a single archival record; with separate series, there is a danger of losing important community “knowledge” contained in non-standards portions of the documents. Many IAB members shared his concern. Most also felt that having non-standards-track information published and referenceable by the community is important.

One way to combat this problem is continued user education. In addition, a variety of approaches for distinguishing standards-track from non-standards-track documents were discussed. One possibility would be to add letters (s for standards, for example) to the RFC numbers and hope that people include the letters when referencing the documents. Another possibility, which was the consensus approach, is to encourage use of the standards number when referencing a standards document rather than the RFC number. This approach has the added value that the standards number does not change even when the standard is updated with one or more new RFCs. Web technology can be used to link the standards to the RFCs that currently define them, thus encouraging their use.

A document will be prepared outlining the second proposal for community input.

5. JTC1 Liason Status

The liason is complete and will be signed by the Internet Society at their next meeting. The final text should now be published as an RFC.

6. DOD Versions of Standards-Track RFCs

The DOD has taken the IETF standards documents and changed “should” in host requirement to “must.” They would like feedback on what they have done. (This also raised the question of the status of the host and router requirements documents, which are somewhat out of date.)

As a first step, someone needs to look at the DOD documents; Lixia volunteered.

7. Planning for the Open IAB Meeting in San Jose

Possible topics:
RFC standards numbering
routing in multiprovider internets
commercialization
impact of qos service
(ask for input, raise issues)

ii workshop spill-over question, if appropriate

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These minutes were prepared by Abel Weinrib, AWeinrib@ibeam.intel.com. An online copy of these and other minutes are available in the directory http://www.iab.org/documents/IABmins.

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