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IAB Minutes 2002-07-16

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Minutes
IAB Meeting — Meeting

16 July 2002, 7:30am – 9:00am JST
16 July 2002, 7:30pm – 10:00pm JST

ATTENDING

    Leslie Daigle — IAB Chair
    Harald Alvestrand — IETF/IESG Chair
    Ran Atkinson
    Rob Austein
    Fred Baker
    Steve Deering
    Sally Floyd
    Ted Hardie
    Geoff Huston
    Charlie Kaufman
    Jim Kempf
    Mike St. Johns
    Eric Rescorla
    Joyce K. Reynolds — Liaison from the RFC Editor
    Erik Nordmark — Liaison from the IESG
    Vern Paxson — IRTF Chair

APOLOGIES

    Lynn St.Amour — Liaison from ISOC

NEXT SCHEDULED MEETING

    Tuesday, August 13, 2002.

AGENDA

    0. Rollcall, Agenda Bash and Previous Minutes
    1. Review of Action Items
    2. Review of Documents
    3. Liaison Reports
    4. ISOC Board of Trustees Appointment Process
    5. ISO liaisons
    6.Technical Discussion

NOTES

2. Review of Documents

3. Liaison Reports

    IESG:
    It was reported that the IESG had been considering the processes involved with the RFC publication process in relation to documents associated with the 3GPP activities. While the imposition of a document preparation time schedule was considered to be useful, there was some concern that the reservation of RFC document numbers would be mis- interpreted as setting a precedent. It was reported that there was a level of confusion over the precise nature of the requirements in this matter, and that its resolution has assisted in clarifying roles and responsibilities.

    RFC EDITOR:
    The RFC Editor’s relationship to the IESG and IAB was considered. It was agreed that while a close working relationship with the IESG was entirely in the best interests of the IETF, consideration of actions that involve changes to the RFC publication process, or issues that may involve some level of setting of precedence should include the IAB liaison.

    The RFC Editor indicated that the published turnaround for RFC publication is between 1 and 2 months, and while the current queue has a 1 month publication editing turnaround, this is not a preferred situation from the perspective of the RFC Editor.

    IRTF:
    The Measurement Research Group will proceed along the lines of the edited charter. The Cryptography Research Group will also be chartered as a mailing list forum.

    The state of the Name Space research effort was considered, and is was suggested as being desireable to allow a 6 month period in order for a report from this effort to be published and considered by the IETF and the research community. Interest levels to continue with this effort will be polled at the end of this period.

    It was reported that the research component of the MANET agenda will be incorporated as a sub-group of the Routing Research Group, and there is consideration of a Simulation Research Group that has arisen from discussion of simulation needed in the development of routing protocols.

    ISOC:
    Fred Baker, Chair of the ISOC Board of Trustees, reported on ISOC. The IAB discussed the current status of ISOC with respect to its activities and financial situation. The President of ISOC will be writing a financial situation report to allow the IAB to assess the current situation in more detail.

    ITU-T:
    There are two outstanding liaison documents that require some IAB response relating to the management of the e164.arpa domain. The IAB understands that the ITU-T has invested effort in establishing relationships with the IAB’s designated technical operator for e164.arpa (RIPE NCC), and the ITU-T is concerned that the current e164.arpa management process description appears to suggest that the IAB can change the designation of the technical operator for e164.arpa without adequate consideration of the ITU’s involvement and processes.

    W3C:
    There has been a recent coordination call with the W3C. The W3C are considering a revision to the IETF’s URI standards, and proposed this as a joint IETF W3C activity if this is to proceed.

    PSO-PC and ICANN:
    The IAB noted that the ICANN Board resolution to adopt the evolution and reform blueprint implies that the PSO will be dissolved. The IAB noted the continuing activity program of the PSO, and requested that the IAB chair write to the President of ICANN requesting clarification regarding the current status of the PSO and the anticipated schedule for the winding up of the PSO. In the light of this level of uncertainty regarding the residual activities of the PSO-PC, the IAB suggested that the IETF members of the PSO-PC cast votes on PSO decisions in such a manner that the PSO refrain from making any binding decisions in this interim period.

    The IAB also reviewed the ICANN blueprint for evolution and reform and referred the manner of the IAB’s participation in the proposed Technical Advisory Committee to the IAB chair for further consultation with ICANN.

4. ISOC Board Appointment process

    The IAB noted that it will be called upon annually to nominate an individual to serve a three year term on the ISOC Board of Trustees.

    The IAB agreed to draft a process that would be presented to the November 2002 IETF Plenary that proposes IAB management of a nomination and evaluation process. The plenary session would be used to describe the proposed process and IETF review and comment would be requested.

5. IETF Process

    The IAB discussed reports that it is taking an increasing amount of time to propose work to the IETF and an increasing amount of time to progress work through the IETF process. It was noted that no individual roles or actions within the IETF process were being examined, but an overall observation of the operation of the entire IETF process. The overall objective implied by these reports was one of establishing whether an re-examination of the IETF process and its operation could reveal ways and means to make this process in some ways faster and more efficient in its operation. Some views were expressed regarding the increasing complexity of technology models being adopted by the IETF in its activities, as well as views regarding the scaling the volume of IETF activities.

    The IAB will reconsider this topic after reviewing collected experiences, and consulting wth the IESG regarding this matter. It is intended to carefully consider potential avenues for constructive discussion on the overall current effectiveness of the operation of the IETF process as a precusor to any potential IAB actions in the matter..

6. Technical Discussion

    Referential Integrity

    The IAB discussed the issue of referential integrity. The particular instance of this issue that was used as an example is that of the potential for the same domain name to be mapped to both A (IPv4) and quadA (IPv6) records where the two records may refer to different systems and, potentially, different services. It was noted that one of the issues here is the desire to consider the two transport networks, V4 and V6, as a single entity, and regard the different transport protocols as a stage within a longer term transition. It was commented that the desire to make the interoperability of the two systems indistinguishable at the symbolic level then implies some requirement for the same “name” to map to the same “service” at a generic level. A very succinct summary of the outcomes of the IAB discussion was the general objective that a change of transport protocol should not implicitly invoke a new context when sharing the use of a name or when using a common symbol set.

    Use of BGP as a Generic Transport

    The IAB briefly discussed aspects of a number of technical proposals that have been brought to the IETF where the BGP protocol is used to carry various payloads including various forms of DNS payloads and VPN identification tags. While this can be regarded as a form of protocol re-use, there was deep concern that there was also the possibility of protocol overload with subsequent operational implications.

    More specifically, it was observed that BGP is a signalling protocol that is designed for, and used to, support a distributed shared state across a network domain. There is an important distinction between this functionality and a generic transport protocol and, accordingly, BGP is seen as an inappropriate protocol choice as a more generic transport utility.

ACTIONS and DOCUMENTS

FUTURE MEETINGS

    Regular teleconference second Tuesday of the month 1500-1700 US East Coast time.

These minutes were prepared by Geoff Huston; comments should be sent to iab-execd@iab.org. An online copy of these and other minutes is available at: http://www.iab.org/documents/IABmins/

IAB Web page is at http://www.iab.org