IETF Report
Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk Fri, 07 May 1993 17:34 UTC
Received: from ietf.nri.reston.va.us by IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US id aa10687; 7 May 93 13:34 EDT
Received: from CNRI.RESTON.VA.US by IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US id aa10683; 7 May 93 13:34 EDT
Received: from sun2.nsfnet-relay.ac.uk by CNRI.Reston.VA.US id aa18371; 7 May 93 13:34 EDT
Via: uk.ac.mailbase; Fri, 7 May 1993 14:09:58 +0100
Received: from [+JANET.000001500100/FTP.MAIL] by uk.ac.mailbase; Fri, 7 May 1993 13:58:36 +0100
Received: from eata.ncl.ac.uk by cheviot.ncl.ac.uk id <AA05477@cheviot.ncl.ac.uk> (5.65cVUW/NCL-CMA.1.35 for <nir%mailbase.ac.uk@newcastle.ac.uk>) with SMTP; Fri, 7 May 1993 13:58:12 +0100
Date: Fri, 07 May 1993 13:57:01 -0000
Sender: ietf-archive-request@IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US
From: Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk
Subject: IETF Report
To: nir@mailbase.ac.uk
Message-Id: <emu-ct08.1993.0507.125701.njf@eata.ncl.ac.uk>
Reply-To: Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk
X-Orig-Sender: nir-request@mailbase.ac.uk
Finally - my report on the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting. The next IETF is in Amsterdam in July. Skip through (if you wish) to the bits on URNs, NIR, WHOIS++ etc etc I am sure that I won't have managed to keep it completely accurate - but it should serve to give people on this list a flavour of what's going on in the NIR world. Which after all is the purpose of this list: short updates on what's going on in the various NIR-type WGs. -- Jill IETF - Columbus: Mar 29-Apr 2, 1993 =================================== Trip Report: Jill Foster - Newcastle University, UK Chairman: RARE Information Services and User Support Working Group Introduction ============ The 26th IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) Meeting took place in Columbus, Ohio from March 29th - April 2nd. Attendance was up again with over 535 pre-registered and a final total of 644 attendees. My main reasons for attending (thanks to funding from RARE) were to: o represent RARE Information Services and User Support Working Group (which I chair) [RARE is the Association of European Research Networks] o join in the User Services and associated WG sessions. o co-chair a WG session on networked information retrieval tools. o co-chair a WG session on network training materials. The following informal report is in note form and deals mainly with the areas of User Support and Networked Information Retrieval, although reports of some of the plenary sessions are also included. Whilst it is as accurate as I can make it, it is naturally a personal account and may be inaccurate due to lack of background information or misinterpretation of what I heard. Corrections of fact are welcome, but any discussion of items contained here would be best directed to the appropriate mailing lists. Minutes of individual sessions are also available via anonymous ftp from nri.reston.va.us This report will be stored on the UK Mailbase Server. To retrieve a copy, email to Mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk with the following command in the body of the message: send wg-isus ietf.03.93 Alternatively use anonymous ftp to: mailbase.ac.uk file: pub/wg-isus/ietf.03.93 [Also available via gopher] Note: in general I have not expanded acronyms as those readers involved in a particular topic should know them whilst those who aren't familiar with the acronyms should still be able to get a reasonable overview of the topic. All addresses quoted in the report are in internet (rather than UK JANET) order. Each section has a double underlined heading - to enable you to skip sections not of interest. Working Group Chairmen's Workshop ================================= The IETF has grown so large both in terms of number of attendees at the meetings and in terms of the number of Working Groups (WGs) that it is no longer possible to pass on tips to WG Chairmen by word of mouth. An informational RFC on guidelines for WG Chairmen is in preparation. As part of the development of this, Dave Crocker held a workshop for Working Group chairs (starting Monday at 8am!). Dave requested feed back on his talk. The talk concentrated on aspects of project and group management (such as the difficulties of making progress whilst remaining fair in listening to all points of view). It could perhaps have contained more of the nitty gritty of the IETF procedural issues (such as progressing a document via draft RFC to full RFC status and the components of a WG charter etc). Nonetheless, it was a useful session, and the forthcoming RFC will be welcome in providing much needed information in one place. Plenary ======= Phil Gross welcomed attendees to the IETF and spoke about the work of the Nominating Committee. As a result of discussions at previous IETFs about the procedural processes of the IETF and the subsequent work of the POISED WG - about half of the IAB and IESG positions were made available and nominations for these had been sought. The nominations committee had been given the task of producing a short-list of suitable candidates who could commit the level of effort required. The committee had sent a list of nominees to the ISOC Trustees and were expecting a decision during the IETF meeting (see later section on Plenary). Technical Presentation: "Next Generation of IP" ---------------------------------------------- Robert Ullman Problems o Address space o Route scaling o TCP window and sequence space (will wrap in 32s on giga bit link) o Interoperation with version 4 required because by then will see a large investment in commercial IP. New generation protocol will take some time to install and by which time several billion dollars investment in V4, therefore, interoperability vital. IPv7 Addresses - want o Small number of top level administrative domains. o Ability to subnet every network assignment. Admin Domain ------------------|--------------|-------------- | | | | | | | Host | ------------------|--------------|-------------- Network This is equivalent to giving everyone on the planet their own network assignment! o Direct mapping of IPv4 numbers. o NSF Administrative Domain. Data Elements ad hoc Group Meeting ================================== IETF sessions run from 9am (sometimes 8!) until 10pm - with an overspill into bar BOFs ("birds of a feather" informal discussions). Nonetheless a group of people interested in (or at least concerned about) data elements managed to squeeze in several informal meetings to discuss the need for standardised ways of describing networked information resources. This followed on partly from the IETF and CNI meetings in Washington in November and the meetings set up there with the Library of Congress and OCLC and subsequent meetings. The group (included various IETF WG chairs, CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) representatives, CNIDR (Clearing House for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval) and the Top Node Project. The immediate need was to try to agree on a common naming of data elements in use by the NIR, IAFA and WHOIS++ templates and on the syntax of the values of some of these elements. Pete Percival (Top Node Project) - who had been battling with the problem of describing networked information resources for some time - tried hard to keep us focussed - but the discussions tended to be circular. There was some disagreement on whether or not one "record" should refer to a resource that appeared in multiple formats or was accessible via multiple methods. I thought it should do - looking at it from the point of view of someone completing the record for the resource. (Resource - such as a set of training workshop sheets available in ascii, postscript, rtf - via anonymous ftp, email or gopher and also available on disc or on paper.) Others, involved in writing the tools to handle the records or templates, wanted multiple records - one for each format. As far as the IAFA, NIR, WHOIS++ templates are concerned, it was agreed that we should draw up an "approved" list of fields for each WG to choose from and use as applicable. There would be a core set of common data elements plus some optional elements. An attempt was made to list and agree on those elements and one of the group volunteered to try to pull some of the discussions together. The need for URNs (Uniform Resource Numbers) and, in the first instance, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) to be included - was acknowledged. Uniform Resource Identifier WG: Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage ========================================================== URI is now the union of Uniform Resource Location and Uniform Resource Number. The idea is to identify information resources uniquely and to allow the location of these by navigational tools. U = Uniform R = Resource { L,N,I, .... } = { Locator, Number, Identifier, ... } In the interests of making real progress in this area, this group had three separate sessions scheduled during this IETF. URL Session ----------- Tim Berners-Lee's revised document was discussed. The problems of addressing sub-objects in a service independent way and of specifying URLs for filenames containing non Latin characters was raised. It was suggested that the MIME specifications were relevant in this area and should be considered rather than producing a separate different specification. It was agreed that in the interests of making progress and of getting out an RFC that the URL should be kept simple and that the other needs and problems should be pushed to the URN. Fragmentation would also be discussed only at a later stage. The document was to get one more pass on the mailing list before being submitted as an RFC. URLs are transient and this fact might pose a security risk as it may provide a false reference and point people to the wrong document. There might be a need for separate authentication in some cases. URI Session ----------- There is difficulty in assigning an identifier to variant forms of a document some of which are "lossy" translations of the original (for example without format information). We need the flexibility to extract content on a variety of levels. We need "Citation" information. We are beginning to see servers that could say "I have this document and I can convert it to 32 different formats for you". A paper submitted to the mailing list by John Kunze was discussed. The URI is the first thing a user will get back from a search. He will need to be able to make a quick decision on which URI he wants. The URI could give cost/no-cost indication. Information needs to be both human and machine/tool readable. Need a Uniform Resource Citation and a method of updating these. Peter Deutsch talked about URNs (why?, characteristics, etc) and a publishing model. Need URNs for o testing equality of content o tracking and versioning o permanent naming. He maintained that the author should have the authority to determine equality but this should be a transferable right. The URN should be unique and be assigned when the document is "published" via a "publisher". Clifford Lynch pointed out that there was not a clean distinction between content and representation. Different people have different ideas on the equality of two documents. For example an archivist may not agree with a librarian. Different publishing agencies may also have different criteria. Perhaps there will be different name spaces with URNs being unique within a given name space. There was a heated argument as to whether there could be a unique URN for a given resource which contained changing data (for example a weather database, gopher menu item, etc). The URN would point to the "box" whose contents might change. There is a need for extra information about objects. Karen Sollins talked about a bag of "factoids" (attribute: value pairs) associated with the resource. Needed to be able to define a set of attributes (but an open set). Should use RFC822 and MIME extensions for this. Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the http specification had used the RFC822 specification and added some additional attributes - such as the operations which could be performed on the object. Have URN -> identification of object URC (citation) -> Description URL -> Location and access information Erik Jul (OCLC) recommended caution when discussing the description. He said terms had been formalised in librarianship and information science. Need for a pilot naming service on the net (for URNs). Need Data Element names and a list of values. Need mechanism for handing around non-text attributes (e.g. icons). It was agreed that someone needed to write a paper to define the context of these discussions for those coming in to it (particularly as library people become involved). Alan Emtage and Chris Weider intend to do this. Mailing list: uri@bunyip.com To join, mail to: uri-request@bunyip.com Archive: archives.cc.mcgill.ca Directory: /pub/uri WHOIS and Network Information Look Up Service Working Group: WNILS: ================================================================== Joan Gargano The WHOIS++ project aims to develop a lightweight useful Internet Directory Service using simple technology. The data model is template oriented. Structure of WHOIS++ database (logical) Template type 1 type 2 type N etc --------- ---------- ---------- | 1 | | | | | --------- | ---------- | ---------- | | 2 | | | | | | | | --------- |-- ----------- |-- ----------- |-- | 3 | | | | | | | | | |-- | |- | |- | | | | | | --------- ----------- ----------- people services ...... Summary information from WHOIS++ servers is propagated up the tree to "centroids". Clients can query parent servers to find servers with given keywords. A new document (WHOIS++ Architecture Document) had been posted to the WNILS list on the Thursday before the meeting. A pilot version of the server had been coded in November and they were currently working on extensions for optional extras, such as a multi-lingual facility and security and authentication. Dave Crocker suggested that the MIME Specification should be used as the basis for some work in this area. Other work required: Error messages extending centroids writing templates support for synonyms (meeting voted against work on this) Data Management tools. BUNYIP (Peter Deutsch et al) had a contract to work on a URN->URL server by the end of April. Jim Fullton reported that they have students working on WHOIS++ clients. Mark Prior (Adelaide) is also working on a server. The aim is to get the current document to an internet draft as soon as possible (feed back required) and to have working server code by end April. mailing list: ietf-wnils@ucdavis.edu mail archives: /pub/archive/wnils or gopher: ucdavis.edu port 70 Integration of Internet Information Resources Working Group (IIIR): ================================================================== Chris Weider The purpose of this working group was to start to pull together some of the applications (WAIS, gopher, archie) and to work on interoperability issues, what new tools should do and to discuss gateway protocol design. Chris Weider had written a paper on "Transponders". The idea was that each networked information resource had an extra "active" bit that remembered who knew about it (held references to it). The purpose of the transponder was to let these "users" know when the resource was moved from its current location. This would require URNs and URLs to be in place first. The vision of the group was of an information architecture that allowed for a variety of protocols (gopher, WAIS, WWW ...) and involved a directory service for resolving a URN -> URL(s). The group was chartered to produce a taxonomy of services such as: Resource Discovery (WHOIS++ eventually) Resource Location archie Resource Access gopher, W3, WAIS Resource Management A taxonomy would indicate the holes in the architecture and would help to focus the debate and would help to rationalise how new information retrieval topics are addressed in the IETF. (Need to avoid the current proliferation of WGs.) IIIR: create RFCs for protocols not yet documented (e.g. gopher protocol). User Services Working Group Chair: Joyce Reynolds =========================== US-WG is the umbrella WG for the various user services area WGs. This is the group which spawns new WGs and coordinates the work in this area. Mailing list for this group: us-wg@nnsc.nsf.net To join, mail to: us-wg-request@nnsc.nsf.net Joyce Reynolds reported that the User Glossary, the DISI (Directory Information Services Infrastructure) and the NOC Tools Working Groups had completed their work and closed down. New Working Groups included IDS (Integrated Directory Services) and the Network Training Working Group. The Internet Users' Glossary RFC1392/FYI18 had been completed. RARE ISUS WG Report: Jill Foster -------------------------------- I had previously circulated a report to the us-wg mailing list prior to the IETF. this report is available via anonymous ftp from: mailbase.ac.uk in the file: /pub/wg-isus/isus-026 The report includes the various ISUS subgroups, their progress and mailing lists. Mailing list of ISUS: wg-isus@rare.nl To join, mail to: mailserver@rare.nl the command (in the text of the message): subscribe wg-isus firstname lastname (substituting your own first and last name) INTERNICS --------- Susan Calcari from General Atomics gave a presentation on the Internics. There had been an NSF solicitation for network information services for NSFnet and NREN. Three separate organisations had received contracts to provide services for (respectively): o Registration - Network Solutions Inc (NSI) o Directory and Database Services - AT&T o Information Services - General Atomics/CERFnet [These services went live on April 1st (during the IETF)] Susan Calcari introduced herself as an "Info Scout" and promised to keep in touch with the IETF and us-wg in particular. The Internic Information Services will run the NIC of NICs providing service to mid level and campus NICs. They would be providing access to their information by o telnet, ftp and mail o archie, WAIS, gopher o NIC link (facility to distribute information out to other NICs) They would be keeping a list of information resources and providing discipline specific information packets. They already had information for the following groups: o Biology o Chemistry o Networking o Librarians o K-12 (schools) Info Scout A five year mission to explore new worlds, seek out new tools and resources, to boldly go where no Internant has gone before! Try to keep track and to have someone keep in touch and keep information up to date. InterNIC Mailing List o Intended for end users and NICs o Announcements only o Collaborative project o nis@InterNIC.net to join, mail to: listserv@InterNIC.net text: subscribe nis your name Quality Evaluation o Tracking o Trouble tickets o Reports o Internal quality scores Co-ordination Services o InterNIC Liaison Council o International Co-operation o Representation to the Community Community Outreach to include: IETF, Farnet, CNI, CIX, ISOC, Educom, SIGUCS NIS "Fest" (National meeting for NIC people) NIS minifests (small regional ones) Training o Use the experts o work with the midlevels and campuses o offer established courses at a discount InterNIC Team Co-ordination o unified InterNIC Interface o common trouble ticket system o joint community activities (did Interop together for example) as appropriate. Unified InterNIC Interface o Common telephone identity .800.444.4345 o Common electronic identity info@internic.net Reference Desk will answer this mailbox and phone Individual Contact Information o Information services info@is.internic.net o Directory and Database Services admin@ds.internic.net o Registration Services hostmaster@rs.internic.net Registration Services will run WHOIS and DNS and will have T1 link. There were questions raised re performance of machines chosen for services. NSF and charging Nothing offered on-line will be charged for (at least for two years) Cost recovery on hard copy. Commercial community will be charged at cost plus. Seminars - charged for - cost recovery. Fees collected will be ploughed back into project in first five years - not for profit. Full staff of seven (two currently). Addresses to contact: scout@internic.net - suggestions for information to put up info@internic.net - general queries Calls routed from old NICs: NNSC and Merit (Pat Smith of Merit said: "Goodbye and good luck!") There would be an NIS fest West Coast July (probably) In an early announcement of the Internic it had stated that the Internic might charge non-US users for access to the information. I asked Susan about this as I was concerned about the implications for central Eastern European users and internet users from third world countries (and the UK!). It might also inhibit a free flow of information from Europe to the US if we then found we were paying for information we'd provided! Susan stated that there were NO plans to charge users for information provided on-line. FYI 4 and 7 (FAQ): Gary Malkin ------------------------------ FYI 7 "FYI on Questions and Answers: Answers to Commonly Asked 'Experienced Internet User' Questions", (Also RFC 1207), February 1991. FYI 4 "FYI on Questions and Answers: Answers to Commonly Asked 'New Internet User' Questions", (Also RFC 1325), May 1992. Gary wanted to update the new user and experienced user Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) RFCs. He suggested "creating" questions for FYI 4. FIY 7 contains actual questions from mailing lists. He had decided that it would be better to use contrived questions and answers for this too. To join the list, mail to: QUAIL-request@XYLOGICS.COM It was suggested that people who had to answer user questions should send in their own "top 5" frequently asked questions to QUAIL@XYLOGICS.COM. World Wide Web BOF Tim Berners Lee ================== The purpose of the BOF was to look at the status of WWW and the possible future directions and to get it started through the IETF review process. The idea of a WWW consortium was raised. There was a need for a single point of presence to go out and push WWW. Need for a place to register WWW servers. WWW - sometimes difficult to install a server. Installation scripts need more work. The vote on whether to start a WWW news group was mentioned. mailing list: www-talk@info.cern.ch to join, mail to: www-talk-request@info.cern.ch NISI - Networked Information Services Infrastructure WG ======================================================= Chair: April Marine This group is concerned with co-ordinating NICs (network information centres) and improving the service they provide. NIC Profile: The group was trying to collect information on the various NICs in the nic-profiles. To place your NIC information: 1. anonymous ftp to merit.edu 2. get /pub/nisi/nic_template 3. edit the template and put in your NIC's information 4. mail the completed template to X500test@merit.edu with 'add' in the subject field if you want more information send to the same address with "help" in subject field NETHELP: The idea was that a new inexperienced user should be able to sit down at a terminal or PC and say "nethelp". This idea has been around for about five years now and the group were facing a decision on whether to drop this idea. Ed Krol had come up with some suggestions on how to implement this. The user's machine should be able to send a packet to the network to find a help file - which would be serviced by the nearest entity - such as the campus router or national provider. The difficulty of course would be the need to update thousands of routers. Some simpler suggestions were made at the meeting, in particular Susan Calcari suggested that the local NIC Services contact could be added to the Templates used for registering Networks - so that a user who did "whois" for his network would be presented with the contact information. Mailing list: nisi@merit.edu To join, mail to: nisi-request@merit.edu Also: Mailing list: nic-forum@merit.edu To join, mail to: nic-forum-request@merit.edu Plenary ======= Erik Huizer: IETF Amsterdam - what to expect. Erik Huizer gave a short entertaining presentation on Amsterdam (complete with 35mm slides) to try to prepare prospective IETF-ers for the first IETF meeting outside of North America (July '93). He appeared in wooden clogs (which he presented to Vint Cerf) and handed out Jeneva and chocolates to various of the IESG and Secretariat. He explained where Holland was "for the benefit of those who had passed through the US educational system" and that people in Europe tended to be more polite to one another. (Hmm!) The conference centre is separate from the hotels (and therefore the registration fee will be slightly higher). He went on to say that there are 1.8 bikes/person in Holland; that you might see more than just coffee on the menu in a coffee shop and that Holland is smaller than Lake Michigan! Networked Information Retrieval WG ================================== Co-chairs: Jill Foster, Jane Smith (for George Brett) Jane Smith (Assistant Director of CNIDR) reported on the Clearing House for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval. They have a cooperative agreement with NSF from April 1st and will be coordinating with the three INTERNICs. They will be rebundling the latest version of WAIS with various other bits and pieces: FreeWAIS. Close liaison with Brewster Kahle (now of WAIS Inc) will be maintained. Peter Scott's Hytelnet will be supported and distributed via CNIDR for a $20 donation for this shareware. Jill Foster gave a brief report on the RARE Information Services and User Support Working Group and the various sub groups (Multimedia Information Services, UNITE: user network interface to everything, etc). NIR "status report": Since the Washington NIR WG, the information on most of the NIR groups and tools had been updated from the appropriate contacts and had been edited together into an internet draft which had been made available prior to the meeting. Access details: anonymous ftp from mailbase.ac.uk file name: pub/nir/nir.status.report An appendix of "Forthcoming Attractions" had been added as well as the other appendices discussed last time. It was agreed to move NCSA MOSAIC for X into the main body of the report. Various other small changes were suggested. The next stage is "evaluation". There needs to be a check-list of facilities. Various volunteers agreed to work on drawing up the checklist and would then circulate this to the main list for comment. Mailing list: nir@mailbase.ac.uk To join, mail to: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk The text: subscribe nir <your firstname> <your lastname> Archives in Directory: /pub/nir Gopher BOF ========== The gopher protocol document which had been around for about two years had been submitted as a draft RFC. There was some discussion as to whether or not it covered current agreed practice. There was also some discussion as to whether the IETF or Gopher Con was the appropriate forum for discussing gopher. The Gopher Team would be attending the next IETF (in Amsterdam). It was agreed not to mention "The L-word": A reference to the controversy over the licensing of gopher. Privacy Enhanced Mail ===================== At the start of the plenary Wolfgang.Schneider@gmd.de announced a version of PEM for non-US citizens (to get around the export restrictions on the algorithms). They have a PEM filter which implements RSA Cryptography, X.509 functionality and local security features. Available for Sun OS 4.1.2 (other Unix, MS-DOS and Mac - soon). UCL (UK) version and Inria (France) versions also expected soon. Internet Talk Radio =================== Carl Malamud gave a presentation on the Internet Talk Radio which would be produced by the company he'd set up. The idea was to produce good quality radio programmes for distribution to various ftp sites around the internet. (Around 60 Mbytes/week.) The content would concern the technology, the politics etc. Sun and O'Reilly were acting as sponsors which meant that the programmes could be made freely available. In the future, conferences could be covered - with daily summaries being given. He also suggested that the IETF "TV" (multicasting the IETF) should now move into production mode to free up the researchers (who usually ran the sessions). Other ideas were mailing list summaries and Internet Traffic congestion reports ("we have just had a report of congestion over south-east Australia ..."). The Radio Show would feature "Geek of the Week" - an interview with an Internet "personality", book reviews, etc. Training Materials WG: Ellen Hoffman and Jill Foster ===================================================== This was the first meeting of the Working Group following the initial BOF session in Washington. A reminder that the main objectives are: o to provide a comprehensive package of "mix and match" training materials for the broad academic community. o to provide a catalogue of existing training materials. Ellen Hoffman described some of the Merit NSFnet Training Seminars and Jill Foster gave an update on the UK NISP/ITTI Training Materials Project at Newcastle. This project had pulled together a list of network training materials available - but the project had now moved on to the next phase. The working group agreed that this catalogue of materials would form a useful basis for work in this group and a couple of members volunteered to work further on this. Jill Foster and other members of the group had tried to define a template for collection of information about training materials taking into account the Top Node Data Elements. There remained some outstanding issues to be resolved - and there was a danger in this becoming bogged down in the more general "Data Elements" discussions. It was also noted that the template needed to include a URN (Uniform Resource Number). The "catalogue" would be followed up on the mailing lists having been pushed forward by a small set of volunteers. Michael Mealing from Georgia Tech was asked to talk about MUDs (multi-user dungeons and dragons), MUSHs (multi-user shared halucinations) and MOOs (object oriented MUDs) in the context of training. The idea was that the next generation of network users will be the "NINTENDO" generation and that we should investigate the possibilities offered by learning by "playing" in a directed interesting environment which allowed interaction with other learners. Michael described a MUSH that had been set up for Biologists and allowed one to "walk around" the DNA sequence. He held an informal BOF on MUDs etc. I would like to see gopher or world wide web being used as a training tool using something like the Tour of the Internet as the basis. The new user could browse the information at a variety of levels of depth and could call out and try various services described. Several sites have put up new user sections. It wouldn't take too much to move from "documentation" to "training material". Perhaps some sound and visuals could be added too - such as very very short messages from prominent people on using the network. The discussion then moved on to the training pack. The Newcastle project is producing a mix and match set of training materials - and the working group discussed the possibilities. I'd like to see high quality recordings of sound interviews being made specifically for training purposes and made available on the network. Carl Malamud (Internet Talk Radio) seemed quite receptive to the idea. We just need to come up with some concrete ideas. Some people felt that sound or radio was very limiting in a training situation. However the idea is to produce a mix and match set of materials that trainers can pick from to suit their personal training style and to match the needs of the particular group they were training. Sound mixed with visuals could be quite effective and would help to vary the format of the presentation. Various people volunteered to work on some of the issues raised and to report back to the mailing list. The RARE WG and US WG mailing lists are currently being used for this Training WG. RARE ISUS: wg-isus@rare.nl to join, mail to: mailserver@rare.nl the text: subscribe wg-isus <your firstname> <your lastname> US-WG: us-wg@nnsc.nsf.net to join, mail to: us-wg-request@nnsc.nsf.net Plenary: INTERNIC ================= The three parties running the Internic (Network Solutions Inc. AT&T and General Atomics) held a plenary session on April 1st to outline their plans and to officially launch the InterNIC. Various people from the parties concerned called in over the network to say their piece as part of the launch and to underline the distributed nature of the InterNIC. One of the aims set out in the NIC solicitation was to use the network for collaboration between the various distributed parts of the NIC. (See also the section on us-wg for details on the Internic Information Services.) Scott Williamson (NSI) described the registration services that they would offer and the move to delegated Registries. (RIPE NCC already handles IP address registration for Europe.) Rick Huber (AT&T) talked about the Directory and Database Services. They would be putting together the Directory of Directories. They would have resource description files and would validate them periodically (say every six months). This information would be made available via WAIS, archie, ftp and gopher by July '93. There would be no fees for accessing the information. Information providers could have one page of information on their resource listed for free. There would also be the option of paying for a more extended listing. Plenary: IESG/IAB Nominations ============================= The results of the votes on the vacant IESG/IAB positions were announced at the last evening of the conference. On the whole the results were greeted favourably, although concern was expressed that WG chairmen of the areas concerned had not been consulted over the choice of area director and that a candidate's attendance (or otherwise) at IETFs had not seemed to have been taken into account. IETF/IESG chair: Phil Gross Standards AD: Lyman Chapin Service Applications AD: Dave Crocker Applications AD: Brewster Kahle Internet AD: Steve Knowles Network Management: Marshall Operations: Scott Bradner Transport AD: Alison Mankin Concluding Remarks ================== The Columbus IETF saw the attendance reach a new maximum and saw the fourth multicast audio and video transmission across the network of the plenary sessions and some WG sessions. This time the OARnet team and the IETF Secretariat handled much of the work for IETF Channel 1 and Channel 2. The idea is to move this facility from "research" to "production service". Again a very hectic, intense and productive IETF with overlap of interest (for me) in the mainstream areas I had wanted to attend and no time to attend related areas (Mail and Directories Working Group meetings). The next IETF will be the first outside of North America. It will be interesting to see whether the high attendance can be maintained. Finally, a reminder that these notes are my view of the IETF. They may not be an accurate view, and certainly do not cover the wide range of topics discussed at the workshop. It's also five weeks ago now since the IETF and things have moved on.... Jill Foster (Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk) 06.05.93
- IETF Report Jill.Foster