CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by April Marine/NASA NAIC

Minutes of the Network Information Services Infrastructure Working Group
(NISI)



Introductions

Taking advantage of our first meeting in Europe, we took some time to
introduce ourselves.  The chairs were very happy that the group included
so many new faces.  In fact, the whole meeting benefited from the new
perspectives brought by our European and other non-American
participants.



Document Discussions

NISI had one Internet-Draft and one document proposal to discuss, and
these discussions took up the bulk of the meeting.


   o ``Current NIC Interrelationships''
     The current Internet-Draft aims to capture how the many different
     types of NICs currently interrelate.  A draft drawing that breezed
     by the earlier discussion in Columbus, Ohio, brought forth much
     more discussion in Amsterdam.  It was finally decided to modify the
     draft in a couple of ways.  First, the one ``generic'' picture
     currently included will be scrapped in favor of at least three
     pictures depicting actual examples, each representing a different
     region, e.g.  Europe, the US, and the Pacific Rim.  Other areas are
     welcome, but were not initially discussed.  Plus, a deeper
     discussion of the various roles different organizations acting as
     NICs play will be included.  Other minor editorial suggestions were
     also made.

   o Paper on Coordinating Handoff of User Problems Between NICs
     The next document proposed was for recommendations regarding how to
     coordinate interaction between NICs when a user query requires the
     services of more than one organization.  This also engendered an
     interesting discussion, with some feeling that as the net becomes
     more commercialized, ``customer service'' segments of it will
     interact less and less.  So, it was agreed that the thrust of the
     document would be toward making recommendations as to how NICs
     would interact with each other i.e., leave the NIC-to-end-user
     interaction to each NIC. NICs would be encouraged to follow such
     recommendations as they choose.  NISI recognizes that we can't tell
     the NICs what to do, only make suggestions.

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Other Items

Pat announced that the NIC profile information is now available via
gopher.  While it is now much easier to view the NIC information, we
need to consider other means of keeping the information current.  Pat
will talk further with the InterNIC about this.  Pushpendra Mohta of the
InterNIC agreed to follow up with Pat.

A suggestion was made to have a mailing list where NIC people could
exchange e-mail on various problems.  We have such a list, called
nic-forum@merit.edu.  We decided to try to jump-start discussion on the
list.  In addition, perhaps the InterNIC could mention the mailing list
at their ``NIC Fest'' coming up.

The problem of getting people to register IN-ADDR information once they
have a net number assigned was mentioned.  Ellen Hoffman said that some
discussion of that could fit into the ``How to Connect'' document that
the USERDOC2 Working Group will be working on.


Wrap Up

The meeting concluded with the chairs promising to solicit input,
especially drawings of NIC relationships, from the attendees.


Attendees

Matti Aarnio             mea@nic.nordu.net
Jodi-Ann Chu             jodi@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu
Henry Clark              henryc@oar.net
David Conrad             davidc@iij.ad.jp
Jill Foster              Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk
Osten Franberg           euaokf@eua.ericsson.se
Ben Geerlings            ben.geerlings@surfnet.nl
Marcel Graf              graf%dhdibm1.bitnet@vm.gmd.de
Maria Heijne             maria.heijne@surfnet.nl
Ellen Hoffman            ellen@merit.edu
Per Jacobsen             p.h.jacobsen@usit.uio.no
Xander Jansen            xander.jansen@surfnet.nl
Brewster Kahle           Brewster@wais.com
Lothar Klein             lothar.klein@gmd.de
Steen Linden             steen.linden@uni-c.dk
John Lindsay             lindsay@kingston.ac.uk
Anne Lord                anne@ripe.net
Gary Malkin              gmalkin@xylogics.com
April Marine             april@atlas.arc.nasa.gov
Brian May                Brian.May@mel.dit.csiro.au
Peter Merdian            merdian@rus.uni-stuttgart.de
Pushpendra Mohta         pushp@cerf.net
Mark Prior               mrp@itd.adelaide.edu.au

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Juergen Rauschenbach     jrau@dfn.de
Joyce K. Reynolds        jkrey@isi.edu
Ulla Sandberg            ulla@kiera.ericsson.se
Srinivas Sataluri        sri@internic.net
Jennifer Sellers         sellers@nsipo.nasa.gov
Patricia Smith           psmith@merit.edu
Marc van der Noordaa     noordaa@rare.nl
Ruediger Volk            rv@informatik.uni-dortmund.de



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