MHS-DS Working Group Minutes

["Kevin E. Jordan" <[e-mail]>]

Here is a revised draft of the MHS-DS minutes.  I have attempted to
incorporate Urs' comments and some of my own.  Please review and return
any comments to me by the end of the day today (US Eastern time), if you
can.  The minutes must be submitted to CNRI today.

best regards,
- kevin -


		   Minutes of MHS-DS Working Group

			    July 13, 1993

			      Amsterdam


Chairpeople:  Harald Tveit Alvestrand  <[e-mail]>
              Kevin Jordan             <[e-mail]>

Secretary:    Jim Romaguera            <[e-mail]>


- Introductions and Administrivia

	- Meeting participants introduced themselves and stated their
          interests in MHS-DS and Project Long Bud.

	- Minutes from Columbus were approved.

	- MHS-DS is now under a new area - SAP.  Dave Crocker is the 
          area director.

- Action Items

	- 8 Internet Drafts were updated by Steve Kille.

	- 3 of the I-D's were recommended to be progressed as Proposed 
          Internet Standards, after some minor editorial changes are
          completed.  The three to be progressed as Proposed Internet
          Standards are:

            "Representing the O/R Address hierarchy in the Directory
             Information Tree"

            "Representing Tables and Subtrees in the Directory"

            "Use of the Directory to support mapping between X.400 and
             RFC 822 Addresses"

        - 1 of the I-D's was recommended to be progressed as an
          Experimental Specification, after minor editorial changes.
          This document is:

           "MHS use of Directory to support MHS Routing"

		- Although there are some minor editorial and technical
                  errors, no substantive errors exist in this document.
                  This document now needs some higher degree of visiability.
                  Two independent implementations already exist and provide
                  proof of the basic concepts. Project Long Bud will show if
                  the concepts scale well by deploying MHS-DS in the Internet.
                  The working draft is stable enough to be published as an RFC.
                  The experimental status is initially appropriate since
                  Long Bud feedback might result in important changes. The
                  final goal is to place the routing document onto the
                  standards track.

	- The "Simple Profile" document is a facilitating document and it 
          should be dropped once the pilot is further along and implementations
          become more mature.  Most of the content of this document can be
          merged into the routing document, specifying some of the
          functionality as mandatory and some as optional.  This has been done
          for other Internet protocol specifications.

	- It was suggested that an acronym be created for the document set
          (e.g. MIME), as RFC numbers change but the acronym would continue
          to be meaningful.

	- Summary of documents and the working group's recommendations 
          for progression:

          draft-ietf-mhsds-infotree-03, "Representing the O/R Address
             hierarchy in the Directory Information Tree", progress as
             Proposed Internet Standard.

          draft-ietf-mhsds-subtrees-03, "Representing Tables and Subtrees
             in the Directory", progress as Proposed Internet Standard.

          draft-ietf-mhsds-supmapping-03, "Use of the Directory to support
             mapping between X.400 and RFC 822 Addresses", progress as
             Proposed Internet Standard.

          draft-ietf-mhsds-routdirectory-03, "MHS use of Directory to support
             MHS Routing", progress as Experimental Specification.

          draft-ietf-mhsds-822dir-03, "Use of the Directory to support routing
             for RFC 822 and related", needs more review and discussion.

          draft-ietf-mhsds-convert-01, "MHS use of Directory to support MHS
             Content Conversion", needs more review and discussion.

          draft-ietf-mhsds-mhsprofile-03, "A simple profile for MHS use of
             Directory", informational document to be dropped eventually.

          draft-ietf-mhsds-long-bud-intro-00, "Introducing Project Long Bud",
             to be edited and reposted as an I-D.  Will be progressed as
             an Informational RFC as soon as possible.

	- Summary of actions from last meeting:

          a. Kevin Jordan to write a Draft RFC providing an overview of the
             main set of MHS-DS RFC's.  Status: not done, but some progress
             has finally been made.
          b. Harald Alvestrand to write pseudo code for the Routing Document.
             Status:  not done.
          c. Steve Kille to update the document set and repost as I-D's.
             Status:  done.
          d. Jim Romaguera to coordinate the writing of Project Long Bud
             definition and participation document(s).  Status:  done.  The
             "Intro to Project Long Bud" document was written and submitted
             as an I-D.  Sylvain Langlois is the principal editor.
          e. Urs Eppenberger to write specifications for a tool which can be
             used to browse and verify X.500 routing and address mapping
             information.  Status:  not done.  This tool is desirable but
             Urs can not commit the time to write its specification.
          f. Panos Tsigaridas to write specifications for and begin
             implementation of tools for synchronizing X.500 directory
             information with GO-MHS routing and mapping tables.
             Status:  done.  A beta version of a tool for reading information
             from the directory and generating GO-MHS tables can be found
             on the MHS-DS file server.
          g. Kevin Jordan and Long Bud Design Team to prepare an informal
             MHS-DS demonstration at IETF in Amsterdam.  Status:  done.  Kevin
             demonstrated live MHS-DS technology and tools in the public
             terminal room of the RAI conference center.

- Long Bud report

	- The meeting participants reviewed the extent of MHS-DS information
          available in the Internet DIT.

	- All of the US MTA and organizational information provided in the
          routing documents available from the University of Wisconsin has
          been added under c=US.  However, it seems that most of the
          MTA's registered under PRMD=XNREN no longer exist;  most do not
          respond to connection requests.  Perhaps the overall state of
          PRMD=XNREN needs to be reviewed.

	- Countries in the DIT having MHS-DS routing entries include; US, GB,
          DK, DE, CH, ES, PT & FR.

- Review of "Introduction to Project Long Bud"

	- A question was asked concerning whether Long Bud participants
          should use static tables as the primary source of routing
          information and fall back on X.500, or whether X.500 should be
          the primary source of routing information with fall-back to
          static tables.  The group concluded that the real aim of Project
          Long Bud is to prove the MHS-DS technology.  Therefore, participants
          should use the Open Community Routing Tree in the X.500 DIT as
          the primary source of routing information.  This tree, possibly
          combined with private routing trees, can also provide default
          routes to the rest of the GO-MHS community to provide full
          connectivity.

	- It was explained that a routing entry within the DIT could 
          point to a relay MTA that knows about the WEPs, and the WEPs 
          can reach everyone.

	- Initially, Long Bud participants probably should not configure
          WEP's as Long Bud MTA's, as Long Bud is a pilot project whose
          purpose is "proof of concept".  Consequently, it is experimental
          in nature, and WEP's should be providing a reliable, product-level
          service.

	- The 'Benefits' section of the Long Bud I-D should not be the last 
          section in the document.  It should be moved to the beginning
          because it is one of the most important aspects of the document.

	- The Long Bud I-D will be updated to document the existance of the
          Project Long Bud 'Status Report'.

	- If a country or ADMD can't establish it's own entry in the DIT then 
          a skeletal entry will be added and managed until the rightful owner 
          asks to administer it's own entry.  Some people questioned whether
          this could really be done, in general, for country entries.

	- The 'Open Tree' must be populated with entries for MTA's that are 
          willing to accept calls from any other MTA's in the Long Bud
          community.

	- Policy - People who are responsible for parts of the DIT must take 
          responsibilty for managing the data and for providing a good
          quality of service.

	- The Long Bud I-D will updated and redistributed by the middle 
          of August.

	- The MHS-DS file-server will be updated to include all Long Bud 
          documentation and public domain tools.

	- It was suggested that MHS-DS object class and attribute definitions
          for Quipu oidtable files be included on the file server.

- Implementations and tools

	- The current status of MHS-DS implementations and tools was
          reviewed.  The Long Bud Status Report will provide details.
          The Status Report will also be updated periodically to reflect
          the current status.

- DIT QOS

	- Reliabilty of the DSAs

           - MHS-DS requires the Internet DSA network to provide a good
             quality of service.

           - The current QOS provided by the Internet DSA network is
             marginal at best.  The US root-level DSA's seem to be
             particularly problematic, especially the DSA's which hold
             the top-level US domains under O=Internet.

	   - These problems might be solved by moving responsibility for
             top-level information to an organization which is well-funded
             to provide good QOS.   InterNIC probably qualifies and
             has expressed an interest providing this service.

- Updated MHS-DS drafts

        - Steve Kille briefly described what changes had been made
          to the MHS-DS I-D's since the previous revisions.  Most of
          the changes were editorial in nature.  A very few were
          more substantial.  For example:

		- Diagram change in the Routing document.

		- The representation for personal name was changed.
                  An RDN with multiple AVA's is now used instead of
                  the RFC1327 representation used previously.

		- O/R address syntax has been aligned to ISO syntax.

	- Some issues were raised on the Routing document:

		- The need for shared bilateral tables raised as a new 
                  concept. Recommended that bilateralTable attribute should 
                  be changed to a sequence of DN's.  This would allow a
                  community of MTA's, e.g. the GO-MHS community, to share
                  a potentially large table of information about MTA's.
                  This could be used, for example, to establish a basis for
                  deciding whether or not a connection request should be
                  accepted or rejected.  If an MTA outside of the community
                  attempts to create a connection to an MTA within the
                  community, the internal MTA could reject the connection
                  after discovering that the caller is not registered in
                  the shared bilateral table.

                  In addition to using the shared table, some MTA's might
                  also have a need for maintaining a bilateral table
                  which records agreements which are truly bilateral.

                  Thus, there appears to be a legitimate need for defining
                  the bilateralTable attribute as a sequence of DN's.  It
                  was decided that this should be discussed further on the
                  mailing list.

		-  'Next Tree First' routing failure action when the top of 
                   a private routing tree is reached needs further discussion. 
                   This change needs to be discussed off-line (/on-line). 
                   Steve, Harald, Kevin & Julian (in absentia) will discuss 
                   this.

		- It was pointed out that an 'Initiator Calling Address'
                  attribute may be needed.  This will be discussed further
                  on the mailing list.

- AOB

	- A tutorial BOF was scheduled for late in the afternoon.  Rhank you
          to Kevin for giving such a tutorial at such short notice. It was
          well received.

- Planning for next meeting

	- MHS-DS will schedule 2 time slots at the Houston IETF meeting.

	- Four of the I-D's should have been progressed as RFC's by then.

	- Progress on Long Bud will be reviewed.

        - A new revision of the "Intro to Project Long Bud" I-D will have
          been distributed, and its disposition will be discussed.

	- The remaining 4 MHS-DS I-D's will be discussed.