Minutes of December '90 DFS-WG meeting

[Peter Honeyman <[e-mail]>]

Internet Engineering Task Force
Distributed File Systems Working Group
DFS-WG

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MEETING NOTES

The DFS-WG met on 3 December 1990 at the Boulder IETF.  The
meeting was attended by

Gregory Bruell            [e-mail]
Lida Carrier              [e-mail]
Karen Frisa               [e-mail]
Ken Hibbard               [e-mail]
Russell Hobby             [e-mail]
Peter Honeyman            [e-mail]
Ole Jacobsen              [e-mail]
Stev Knowles              [e-mail]
Carl Malamud              [e-mail]
Tony Mason                [e-mail]
Matt Mathis               [e-mail]
Donald Morris             [e-mail]
Chris Myers               [e-mail]
Andy Nicholson            [e-mail]
David O'Leary             [e-mail]
Mark Stein                [e-mail]
John Veizades             [e-mail]
David Waitzman            [e-mail]
Carol Ward                [e-mail]

Attendees were added to the working group mailing list.

The focal point of the WG continues to be wide-area NFS, i.e.,
NFS-across-the-Internet.  Particular concerns fall into two
areas:  congestion control and authentication/authorization.

Regarding the former, the consensus is that real progress on
congestion control for NFS lies in the hands of vendors, not in
those of Internet researchers and engineers.  Furthermore, many
attendees doubt whether the WG can do much to influence vendors
to address problems that are long-standing and well-known.

Along these lines, the following questions were raised:

    Can NFS' congestion handling be fixed?
    Could Sun fix it?
    Could the IETF fix it without Sun's cooperation?
    Is it legitimate to focus solely on Sun/RPC?
    Would Sun work with the IETF?  Should we care?
    What role does AFS play?  Or the Guelph NFS on TCP?

The answers to these questions are not entirely obvious.
Nevertheless, the WG is proceeding to document the shortcomings
in NFS/RPC/UDP as they affect good Internet-citizenship.

The WG urges backbone and regional network administrators to
monitor the ports used by NFS (principally UDP/2049) when
gathering network usage statistics; in this way, the IETF can
gauge the severity of the wide-area NFS problem.

Regarding authentication and authorization, the DFS-WG deems it
appropriate to delegate such issues to the WGs dedicated to
these areas.  The DFS-WG will enumerate its special concerns and
bring them to the attention of the appropriate security WGs at
the next IETF meeting.