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- CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
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- Reported by Richard Smith/Datability, Walt Wimer/CMU
- Tony Staw/DEC and Philip Almquist/Consultant
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- RREQ Minutes
-
- The Router Requirements Working Group held a grueling but very
- productive series of meetings in Boulder. Although the Link Layer
- Requirements document is unfortunately on hold, we are on target to
- complete the Router Requirements document on schedule, after the March
- IETF Meeting. The Chair would particularly like to thank the note
- takers (Richard Smith, Walt Wimer, and Tony Staw) and those hardy souls
- who attended all of the sessions.
-
- On Monday afternoon, the Chair conducted a brief orientation session,
- intended primarily for those who would be attending a Router
- Requirements meeting for the first time. Also in attendance were
- several long-standing Working Group participants (who helped answer the
- hard questions) and a number of people who were just generally
- interested in learning more about the Router Requirements effort.
-
- Tuesday morning was devoted to careful review of the first part of the
- (then current) Router Requirements draft (rreq/rreq.doc.v6, available
- via anonymous FTP from Jessica.Stanford.EDU). The most notable issues
- raised were:
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-
- oConformance: There is substantial concern in at least a few
- quarters that MUST and SHOULD don't mean the same thing in Router
- Requirements as they do in Host Requirements, since Router
- Requirements explicitly allows conformant systems to have
- configuration options which allow them to be configured to act in a
- non-conformant manner (Host Requirements is silent on this topic).
- Purists thought that this is a terrible idea, while most vendors
- insisted that this is necessary if vendors are expected to produce
- conformant products. Consensus was not reached on any changes.
-
- oFragmentation: There was prolonged debate on the details of how
- fragmentation should be done. The underlying issue was a tradeoff
- between maximizing router performance and maximizing the likelihood
- that an end system whose network interface has inadequate buffering
- will be able to successfully reassemble. It was finally resolved
- to allow implementors to make that tradeoff however they saw fit.
-
-
- Wednesday morning session was divided among several activities. Most of
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- the session was devoted to:
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- oCoordination with the Security Area: Steve Crocker (IETF Security
- Area Director) gave a brief presentation describing the IETF
- Security Area and his views on the overlap between routers and
- security. This provoked some lively discussion of the issues.
- Steve also announced that he has asked Mike StJohns to undertake
- ongoing liason between the Security Area and the Router
- Requirements Working Group.
-
- oDiscussion of Route Lookup Algorithms: We discussed the (then
- current) draft of a paper called ``Ruminations on the Next Hop'' by
- Philip Almquist (rreq/rparadigm.psf.v1, available via anonymous FTP
- from Jessica.Stanford.EDU). This paper is concerned primarily with
- how a router which is simultaneously running more than one routing
- protocol (or multiple instances of a single routing protocol) might
- decide how to route packets. The results of this discussion will
- be reflected in a revised version of the paper, planned for early
- 1991.
-
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- Noel Chiappa, Our IETF Area Director, asked us to spend the rest of the
- Wednesday session discussing a couple of issues of interest to the IESG:
-
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- oIGP Standards: Most of the group felt that the IESG's stated
- prerequisite for making a choice (significant operational
- experience with at least one of the candidate protocols) had been
- met. Although neither has been tested in a truly large and complex
- network, it is unreasonable to expect that a remedy will be found
- that any time soon, given that today's networks have been designed
- to be topologically simple enough to work (at least marginally
- well) using the older protocols. A clear majority of those
- present, including all who had operational OSPF networks, felt that
- it should be recommended to the IESG that OSPF be chosen as the
- Internet standard IGP. However, Dual IS-IS also had some vocal
- support, as did the view that routers should implement both OSPF
- and Dual IS-IS. Despite the disagreements over the protocols, there
- seemed to be general agreement that resolution of this issue by the
- IAB is an important prerequisite for completion of Router
- Requirements. The issue is far too critical to interoperability to
- be ignored by any useful router standard.
-
- oSize and Semantics of the IP TOS Header Field: We decided to
- recommend to the IESG that TOS ought to be a four bit field,
- comprising the three bits defined in RFC-791 and the adjacent bit
- which is defined as reserved in RFC-791 but as part of the TOS in
- RFC-1122. This bit would be defined as ``minimize (monetary)
- cost''. The remaining bit added to TOS by RFC-1122 would revert to
- being reserved. The meaning of a TOS field in which more than a
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- single bit was set was left ``for further study''.
-
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- Thursday morning and Thursday evening were consumed by a careful review
- of the remainder of the Router Requirements draft. Major topics
- included:
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- oThe Operations And Maintenance Chapter: There was some debate
- about how appropriate it was for the standard to make requirements
- about ``non-protocol'' issues as diagnostics, provisions for out of
- band access, and loading and dumping of software. For the most
- part it was mostly concluded that it was quite appropriate, though
- in some cases it was decided to water down the requirements
- proposed in the draft.
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- oThe Routing Protocols Chapter: Although this chapter generated
- little heated debate, considerable time was spent examining it
- carefully and noting places where it needs additional fleshing out.
- It was particularly noted (but also noted that the group was were
- too tired to resolve just then) that it was difficult to understand
- the ``right'' way to leak routing information between routing
- protocols.
-
- oRedirects and Destination Unreachables: There were long
- discussions about when it was appropriate to generate several of
- the classes of ICMP Unreachable messages. There was also a related
- debate about whether it is ever appropriate to generate the various
- network (as opposed to host) forms of Unreachables and Redirects.
- The answer to the latter question turned out to be no, since only
- nonconformant hosts treat the two forms differently.
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- Attendees
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- Philip Almquist almquist@jessica.stanford.edu
- William Barns barns@gateway.mitre.org
- Ronald Broersma ron@nosc.mil
- Stewart Bryant bryant@enet.dec.com
- Duane Butler dmb@network.com
- Ross Callon callon@bigfut.enet.dec.com
- Robert Collet /pn=robert.d.collet/o=us.sprint/admd=telemail/c=us/@sprint. com
- Steve Crocker crocker@tis.com
- Steve Deering deering@xerox.com
- Kurt Dobbins dobbins@ctron.com
- Avri Doria avri@clearpoint.com
- James Dray dray@st1.ncsl.nist.gov
- Dino Farinacci dino@esd.3com.com
- Jeffrey Fitzgerald jjf@fibercom.com
- Jeff Forys forys@cs.utah.edu
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- Vince Fuller vaf@Standford.EDU
- James Galvin galvin@tis.com
- Martin Gross gross@polaris.dca.mil
- Chris Gunner gunner@osicwg.enet.dec.com
- Jack Hahn hahn@umd5.umd.edu
- Ken Hibbard hibbard@xylogics.com
- Jeffrey Honig jch@devvax.tn.cornell.edu
- Kathleen Huber khuber@bbn.com
- Joel Jacobs jdj@mitre.org
- Ole Jacobsen ole@csli.stanford.edu
- Harold Jones hjones@nac.dec.com
- Frank Kastenholz kasten@interlan.com
- Tom Kessler kessler@sun.com
- Stev Knowles stev@ftp.com
- Alex Koifman akoifman@bbn.com
- William Kutz Kutz@dockmaster.ncsc.mil
- John Lekashman lekash@nas.nasa.gov
- Mark Leon leon@nsipo.arc.nasa.gov
- Joshua Littlefield josh@cayman.com
- Gary Malkin gmalkin@ftp.com
- Donald Merritt don@brl.mil
- James Mostek mostek@cray.com
- Brad Parker brad@cayman.com
- Michael Reilly reilly@nsl.dec.com
- Yakov Rekhter yakov@ibm.com
- Ken Schroder schroder@bbn.com
- John Seligson farcomp!johnsel@apple.com
- Keith Sklower sklower@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
- Richard Smith smiddy@pluto.dss.com
- Michael St. Johns stjohns@umd5.umd.edu
- Tony Staw staw@marvin.enet.dec.com
- Roxanne Streeter streeter@nsipo.nasa.gov
- Osamu Takada takada@sdl.hitachi.co.jp
- Glenn Trewitt trewitt@nsl.pa.dec.com
- Jonathan Wenocur jhw@shiva.com
- Walter Wimer walter.wimer@andrew.cmu.edu
- Cathy Wittbrodt cjw@nersc.gov
- Richard Woundy rwoundy@ibm.com
- Fei Xu fei@tdd.sj.nec.com
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