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rtfm-minutes-96jun.txt
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1996-10-07
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Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited.
REALTIME TRAFFICE FLOW MEASUREMENT WORKING GROUP
MEETING, MONTREAL, 26-JUN-96
Minutes produced by Cyndi Mills and Nevil Brownlee
REVIEW OF CURRENT DOCUMENTS
The current 'traffic flow measurement architecture' and 'traffic flow
measurement meter mib' documents have been submitted for publicaton
as experimental RFCs.
The 'experiences' document was published as an Internet Draft in May.
Two changes were suggested:
(1) The term describing the former 'fail' or 'retry' action
(indicating that an address has not matched a rule during a pass
through the rule set) will be changed to 'NoMatch.' (2) In response to
the question of whether flow type attributes should
contain both source and destination separately; the consensus was that
both should remain unless there is a specific future need to reduce the
generality of the architecture.
The original intention was to revise RFC 1272. The group agreed to
leave RFC 1272 as is with its accounting focus, and produce new
background information focussed on traffic flow measurement. This
should address specifically the definition of flows as used in traffic
flow measurement.
PRESENTATIONS
Presentations were made by the two current implementors of the traffic
meter.
Sig Handelman has deployed the IBM implementation in a multi-
Ethernet environment. The meter has contained over 64,000 flows while
maintaining good performance. Since the meter runs on a Unix system,
the collection mechanism writes active flows periodically to a disk file
for later collection by a bulk transfer mechanism.
The NetFlow presentation by Nevil Browlee demonstrated uses of
timing information provided by the meter to pinpoint 'interesting'
flows, for example the protocols and attributes of short high-rate flows
(bursts) and long-lived flows (sessions). Plots produced by NetFlow
illustrated useful techniques for visualising complex relationship of
flow age, protocol composition, and volume.
NEW ARCHITECTURE FEATURES
The group agreed that the basic architecture is appropriate in its
present form and began discussions to identify those attributes which
might be added to extend its usefulness. In particular, the working
group expressed the need for some of these new attributes to support
emerging services and real-time flows. These discussions centered
around requirements and features needed for the following areas:
IP version 6
The working group should verify that the current architecture supports
IPv6 and identify any desirable new attributes to support additional
features of IPv6.
Application-layer attributes
In support of application level gateways (e.g. EDI, firewalls) and
application level services (file transfer, messaging, etc.) there was
interest in reporting generic application units (where the meaning of
the unnamed unit is determined by the application, e.g. files for ftp,
pages for html, etc) as well as generic error measurement (failures,
sessions, retransmissions,...). A third set of capabilities would be the
addition of application-defined pairs (name + count pairs.)
Rule Table matching extension
Proposed was an extension which would allow a rule table to
distinguish between a source-dest and a dest-source match.
Interpacket times
For the purpose of measuring jitter and delay, specifically in real-time
applications such as audio and video packet streams, the working group
desires an optional means for collecting interpacket delays and spacing.
Interpacket times indicate either the time between packet sent and
received (e.g. ping) or between two consecutive packets flowing in the
same direction (e.g. video stream).
Support for resource-controlled flows
Additional attributes may be needed which support the comparison of
expected and actual traffic flows.
Other Discussion
Sometimes it is necessary to use a single meter to collect information for
several different purposes, e.g. deciding "who is using my network?"
(which requires address aggregation and long collection intervals) and
"how well is my network performing?" (which requires protocol
aggregation and short collection intervals). The current architecture
allows a meter to run two rule sets simultaneously, and for the flow
data to be collected by multiple meters in an aysnchronnous manner.
REVIEW OF WORKING GROUP GOALS AND MILESTONES
The working group produced a revised set of goals and milestones as
follows:
Jun 96: Submit 'Traffic Flow Measurement: Architecture' and
'Traffic Flow Measurement: Meter MIB' I-Ds for publication as
experimental RFCs
Sep 96: Submit 'Traffic Flow Measurement: Experiences with
NeTraMet'
I-D for publication as RFC
Nov 96: Publish I-D on 'New Attributes for Traffic Flow Measurment'
Dec 96: Select which new attributes will be included in the new
proposed standard Traffic Flow Architecture.
Mar 97: Submit architecture document(s) as proposed standard
Begin work on implementation document
Jun 97: Submit implementation document for publication as an RFC
ACTION ITEMS
The RTFM working group maintains a web page at
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/net/Internet/rtfm/TOP.html Document
editing team:
Cyndi Mills, Greg Ruth, Nevil Brownlee, Robert Bradshaw Revise
experiences I-D:
Nevil Brownlee
Generate new background information:
Cyndi Mills
Edit new atttributes:
Greg Ruth, Sig Handelman
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