IETF STEERING GROUP (IESG) REPORT FROM THE TELECONFERENCE May 28th, 1992 Reported by: Greg Vaudreuil, IESG Secretary This report contains - Meeting - Meeting Attendees - Meeting Notes Please contact IESG Secretary Greg Vaudreuil for more information. ATTENDEES --------- Almquist, Philip / Consultant Borman, David / Cray Research Crocker, Dave / TBO Gross, Philip / ANS Hobby, Russ / UC-DAVIS Reynolds, Joyce / ISI Piscitello, Dave/ Bellcore Stockman, Bernard / SUNET/NORDUnet Vaudreuil, Greg / CNRI Regrets Chiappa, Noel Crocker, Steve / TIS Coya, Steve / CNRI Davin, Chuck / MIT Estrada, Susan / CERFnet Hinden, Robert / SUN Huizer, Erik / SURFnet AGENDA ------ 1. Administrivia 1.1 Bash the Agenda 1.2 Approval of the Minutes 1.2.1 Minutes of March 26 1.2.2 Minutes of April 27th 1.2.3 Minutes of May 4th 1.2.4 Minutes of May 11th 1.3 Next Meeting 2.0 Review of Action Items 3.0 Protocol Actions 3.1 PPP Authentication 3.2 SNMP Security 3.3 BGP Next Hop SNPA Attribute 3.4 SUPDUP 3.5 CLNP PING 3.6 Hostname Protocol 3.7 TFTP Protocol 3.8 PCMAIL 3.9 NFILE 3.10 SFTP 3.11 "ISO" Transport on TCP 3.12 WHOIS 3.13 RIP 3.14 BGP/OSPF Interactions 3.15 IDPR 4.0 Old Protocol Actions 4.1 RFC 951, RFC 1084 Bootstrap Protocol and Extensions 4.2 RFC 1144 Van Jacobsen Header Compression 4.3 RFC 1094 NFS 4.4 RFC 1057 RPC 4.5 RFC 887 Resource Location 5.0 Technical Management Issues 5.1 IESG Recommendation on ROAD work 5.2 IP Address Assignment Policies 6.0 Working Group Actions 6.1 OSI General MINUTES ------- 1. Administrivia 1.1 Bash the Agenda The attendance at this Thursday Teleconference was a bit low. Because of missing IESG members, some of the agenda was skipped. There was discussion the IESG meeting dates and agreement was reached to resume Monday meetings as soon as possible. 1.2 Approval of the Minutes The minutes of the March 26th, April 27th, and May 4th teleconference were approved. 1.3 Next Meeting The IESG scheduled an conference for the next day, Friday May 29th from 12-2 EDT to discuss the ROAD recommendation authored by Philip Almquist. The previously scheduled meeting for Thursday June 4th will remain. 2.0 Action Items The action items were not reviewed at this meeting. 3.0 Protocol Actions The review of expired protocols resulted in a full list of protocol actions. 3.1 PPP Authentication The IAB had a few questions about the PPP Authentication Protocols. Without the attendance of Steve Crocker, discussion was deferred. 3.2 SNMP Security There is continued discussion on the SNMP Security documents. There has been some negative publicity concerning the lengthy delays getting these documents published. ACTION: Gross -- Send a note to the IAB expressing IESG concern about delays in approving the PPP Authentication and Secure SNMP protocols. 3.3 BGP Next Hop SNPA Attribute. The IAB has a few comments on specific aspects of this new BGP attribute. In reviewing these questions, it is becoming apparent that this extension to BGP does not have a strong constituency. It was reviewed by the BGP and IPLPDN working group, but the author as expressed the opinion that this protocol extension may already be OBE, and has no objections to removing it from the standards process. The chair of the IESG expressed grave concern that the IESG passed a protocol to the IAB that was not supported by the IETF. ACTION: Hinden, Piscitello -- Investigate the constituency and seek clarification of the process by which the BGP attribute was sent to the IESG for standards consideration. 3.4 SUPDUP The IESG has received no negative comments in response to the last call proposing to move SUPDUP to Historic Standard Status. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Send a recommendation to the IAB to move SUPDUP, RFC 734, to Historical Standard Status. 3.5 CLNP PING The responses to the IESG last call on the CLNP PING protocol were not generally favorable. The situation with the ISO work on a similar protocol is not clear. The Area Director proposed deferring action on this protocol for a couple of months to get a better reading on other standardization activities. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Send a note to the IETF suggesting that the IESG defer action on advancing RFC 1139, CLNP "Ping" until the prospects for the pending ISO consideration of this protocol can be better assessed. 3.6 Hostname Protocol The IESG has received no negative comments in response to the last call proposing to move the Hostname Protocol to Historic Standard Status. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Send a recommendation to the IAB to move the Hostname Protocol, RFC 953 to Historical Standard Status. 3.7 Trivial FTP Protocol TFTP is a solid part of the Internet architecture. It is widely implemented and deployed. No technical objections to the protocol were sent in response to the last call. Karen Solins would like the authorship of the draft to include Noel as an editor. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- After resolving the questions of authorship of the TFTP document, send a recommendation to the IAB to elevate TFTP to Standard Status. 3.8 PCMAIL Many comments were received by the IESG in response to the last call. There was significant response indicating that the protocol was in active use. PCMAIL is clearly not a dead protocol, but it has failed to gain wider acceptance over the past two years. Unfortunately, it appears that PCMAIL is being deployed and supported by only a single company. PCMAIL does not appear to have the multiple interoperable implementations required for Draft Standard Stage. The IESG discussed the general question of whether protocols in current use should be designated as Historic. In the case of PCMAIL, the IESG felt that the status of "Informational Protocol" was clearly a more appropriate status reflecting the pseudo-proprietary nature of the protocol. Action: Vaudreuil -- Write a draft recommendation to the IAB moving PCMAIL to Informational. Send this note to the IESG for review. ACTION: Hobby -- Contact the relevant people at FTP Software and make the case that PCMAIL is not ready for Draft Standard. 3.9 NFILE The IESG has received no negative comments in response to the last call proposing to move NFILE to Historic Standard Status. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Send a recommendation to the IAB to move NFILE, RFC 1037, to Historical Standard Status. 3.10 Simple File Transfer Protocol The IESG has received no negative comments in response to the last call proposing to move the SFTP Protocol to Historic Standard Status. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Send a recommendation to the IAB to move the SFTP Protocol, RFC 913, to Historical Standard Status. 3.11 "ISO" Transport on the TCP Several comments were received during the last call period suggesting editorial changes to the specifications. The title of the protocol, "ISO Transport on the TCP" was felt to be mis-representative. The specification only specifies Connection oriented transport, not connectionless. Further, use of ISO to identify OSI protocols is not currently considered preferable ACTION: Piscitello -- Contact Marshall Rose and request an editorial pass be made over the document before it is promoted to Standard. 3.12 WHOIS There was a single negative comment received in response to the last call. The assertion was that whois documents a single service from a single provider which has little utility over merely registering the port. The IESG discussed, and agreed that WHOIS servers are much more widely deployed that commonly believed, and that the interface is used to various information systems including the X.500 pilot project. ACTION: Russ Hobby -- Send a note responding to the WHOIS objection. In the note, make a solicitation for more information on existing servers. WHOIS is one of the older Internet Protocols. As such the documentation is likely to be limited and may have assumptions in it which are no longer valid. ACTION: Hobby -- Review the WHOIS Specification for accuracy and clarity. If it requires modifications, initiate work on a new document reflecting current practice. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Craft and send a recommendation to the IAB elevating WHOIS to Standard Status after outstanding questions about accuracy are resolved. WHOIS is one of the commonly use Internet directory services. The "System" of whois servers is not well documented, and is therefore less useful than it could be. Emerging technologies such as that used by World Wide Web (WWW) and Archie attempt to aggregate information from servers of this sort but do it in an ad-hoc manner. The IESG briefly discussed work that could be initiated in the IETF to help, and agreed to discuss that at a future time. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Add a discussion of WHOIS-like information services to a future IESG Agenda. 3.13 Routing Information Protocol The IESG received mixed comments on the elevation of RIP to Standard. There was a concern that elevating RIP to Standard will send a mixed signal to the community. RIP is an old-style routing protocols which neither fully supports current routing architecture, but does not support future routing either. The IESG discussed these objections and agreed that a mixed signal could be given. RIP is widely deployed and does meet the requirements for a Standard Protocol. RIP is the most widely used routing protocol. The IESG agreed to recommend RIP to Standard with a strong statement that this is part of the Grandfathering process and does not reflect a change in routing policy. Vaudreuil -- Draft the recommendation to the IAB elevating RIP to Full Standard. Include in the note the reasons the IESG is advocating this action. 3.14 BGP-OSPF Interactions. The IESG did not discuss this document. 4.0 Old Protocols Needing Review 4.1 BootP and Extensions The IESG requires more information to evaluate BootP in light of the work continuing in the DHC working group, which should be wrapped up soon. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Invite Ralph Droms to participate in an upcoming IESG teleconference to discuss BootP and the timetable for DHC completion. 4.2 Header Compression There has been no response from Van Jacobsen to queries about the accuracy of the header compression document. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Send a last Call for VJ Header Compression to the IETF list for Draft Standard. Explicitly solicit information on known problems. 4.3 NFS It is clear that NFS is not fully implementable from the NFS RFCs. The RFC are not incorrect, and they reflect the current version of NFS, but are not complete and are missing critical information. If they were to progress they need to be expanded and clarified. More complete specifications are available from XOpen. The IESG has received no word from SUN on their intention to continue down the IETF standard process. If SUN is not interested in pursuing standardization, the IESG agreed that Historical is the likely state for these documents. Hinden and Borman will continue their action to get a signal of intention from SUN. 4.4 RPC RPC was not discussed independently of NFS but is subject to the same consideration. 4.5 Resource Location Resource Location was not discussed. 5.0 Technical Management Issues 5.1 Review of IESG Recommendation on ROAD Work The IESG was unable to discuss the ROAD recommendation due to lack of time. A follow on teleconference was schedule for the next day, May 29. ACTION: Vaudreuil -- Set up a teleconference for May 29th to discuss ROAD Issues. 6.0 Working Group actions. 6.1 OSI General Discussion on disbanding the OSI General Working group was not held.