Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/inet/ietf/93mar/area.operations.93mar.txt

Text File | 1993-05-18 | 11KB | 271 lines

Operational Requirements Area

Director(s):


   o Phill Gross:  [e-mail]
   o Bernhard Stockman:  [e-mail]


Area Summary reported by Bernhard Stockman/SUNET

Generic Internet Service Specification BOF (GISS)

Tony Bates gave a brief overview of a project to try to produce a
specification for a ``Generic Internet Service Specification''.  The
primary emphasis of this work is at the ``provider/provider'' interface
rather than at the ``user/provider'' interface.  The goal is to make it
easier for new service providers to understand and interwork with
various other service providers.  The plan is to have a specification
document that will need to be updated and also highlight areas for
further study or beyond scope.

A pointer was raised to the FYI16 document which could be augmented
slightly to cover the ``user/provider'' interface in a less ``U.S.''
centric approach.  However, this is not the primary focus of this
current specification.

Within the brainstorming session some concerns were raised as to whether
such a document could mandate items that a service provider should
provide.  The document would raise issues rather than mandating
anything.  It was clear that the document would have to be revised on a
regular basis.  A list of ``first-pass'' items for the specification
were worked through.  Many of the items could easily fall into more than
one category.  The first pass list will cover the following items:


   o Routing issues
   o Addressing
   o Information Provision
   o Operations
   o Connectivity
   o Engineering and Maintenance
   o Attachment
   o Generic Services Coordination
   o Other networks
   o AUP (more than routing)
   o Remote/Local management


Tony Bates will draft the details and circulate to the giss list.  those
wishing to join the giss list they can do so by sending a message to:
[e-mail]


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Dan Long, John Curran and David Conrad will act as reviewers.  Daniel
Karrenberg will follow up on the revision of FYI 16.

It was decided not to ask for an IETF working group at this stage.  The
draft will be sent out to the ORAD list and see whether or not there is
enough interest to create a working group.

MBONE Engineering and Operations BOF (MBONE)

Initially some general issues were discussed.

The Mbone is dangerous, but the applications are very useful.  Critical
problems are largely due to the lack of tools to manage the mbone.  The
meeting discussed different approaches to deal with problems from
various groups involved in the mbone community such as network
operators, network subscribers and end users.  The Group unanimous
agreed that it is bad practice of network operators to support mbone
tunnels into other regions to solve the problem that a subscriber does
not get satisfactory service from his network operator.

The meeting continued with discussing the new encapsulated tunneling
code.  The original code is a seriously bastardized use of LSRR
seriously violating the IP specifications.  The new mrouted supports
both, defaulting to encapsulation.  There was talk of adding clean
source routing options to the encapsulating code such that network
operators could prevent tunnels from moving to fall back infrastructure
during network failures.

Most of the rest of the meeting was spend drafting a wish list.  Some of
the items are appropriate for a future meeting of this BOF or WG. Other
items are appropriate for specific groups or projects involved in
multicast research.  The items are ordered by priority within each
section, but the sections are independent of each other.  Throughout the
discussion it was understood that resources are tight, and in many cases
we were asking people to contribute effort without additional support.

The wish lists were presented to both the AVT Working Group and to the
Operational Requirements Area Directorate (ORAD). There was general
agreement that the items on the wish list are desirable and appropriate,
but nobody agreed to implement anything.

There were some network operators present at the ORAD meeting who were
upset that the MBONE BOF did not become a WG or take stronger positions
regarding operational practices.  However most of these people were
operators who had chosen not to participate in the mbone, and were
therefore not in control of its impact on their own facilities.

BGP Deployment Working Group (BGPDEPL)

BGP-4 deployment:



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ANS/NSFnet/GATED          BGP4 is working in a test mode.

CISCO                     BGP4 is under still under development.

3-COM                     Expects to support BGP4 in early this fall.

Wellfleet                 Anticipates rolling out BGP4 support this
                          summer.

Telebit/EuropaNet         No current plans for BGP4 deployment.



CIDR core plans (Alternet, CIX, EBONE, NSFnet/ANS, NSI, PSI, Sprint):


  1. Start deploying BGP4 code as soon as possible.
  2. NSI (or some alternative) starts announcing one aggregated network.
  3. Additional CIDR core members start aggregating networks.
  4. Aggregation is officially ``turned on'' in the Internet.


The members of the CIDR core are progressing as fast a possible, and are
well coordinated among themselves.

CIDR configuration issues:

There is some controversy over how to do global configuration checking.
In addition, how can we one ensure topology matches policy?  Merit
presented a preliminary plan for aggregation support in the NSFnet.
This support would:  1) accept aggregate routes from a midlevel.  or 2)
would accept site routes from a midlevel, and aggregate on the midlevels
behalf.  A strawman database format proposal is documented in the
``Inter-domain Routing Policy Description and Sharing'' Internet-Draft
(draft-yu-rpd.00.txt).

The representatives from RIPE pointed out that the existing U.S.
databases, including the current Merit configuration database and the
above proposal are not adequate to solve international routing problems.
In particular none can be used to determine which backbone (CIDR core
member) is the preferred path to a given US network.

The sense of urgency came primarily from concerns about configuration
management and database issues.  Although there is still a lot of work
to be done to complete the BGP4 roll out, it seems to be a fairly well
understood problem except for configuration management.  CIDR and BGP4
do impose some new requirements on the databases but the majority of the
issues center around topology and AUP enforcement.  For theses reasons
it makes sense to broaden the scope of this Working Group from just BGP
deployment to the wider task of fostering sanity in topology, routing
policy, and configuration databases.

Network OSI Operations Working Group (NOOP)

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Russell Blaesing talked about his Transport MIB. He is going to put his
implementation up for anonymous ftp.  He is also going to submit a new
version of the draft because the old one expired.  The Group decided
that it don't know if the MIB needed variables added or removed, so we
will put it out there and see how it works.

The Essential Tools for the OSI Internet was discussed.  With some minor
changes it is going to be submitted as a Proposed Standard.  The Echo
draft will also be submitted as a Proposed Standard.

Work is going to be put into trying to keep the OSI infrastructure up
and operational.  Sue Hares is going to have one of her folks put the
EON tunnel configuration up for anonymous ftp along with information
about reachable CLNS hosts throughout the Internet.  She will also try
to get someone to start pinging these hosts (via CLNS) and sending mail
if there are outages.

The deployment of TUBA was discussed.  Several implementations are
available and folks are interested in trying them.

The Group concluded that unless there is more work that needs to be done
with the deployment of TUBA that NOOP will probably suspend their work
for a time until they are needed again.

Operational Requirements Area Directorate (ORAD)

The ORAD mandates were discussed.  It was agreed that ORAD was a good
forum for discussing operational related items among network service
providers.  Thus the purpose of the meeting should be to coordinate
operation of individual networks, not to change each networks own
policy.

It was pointed out that many Standard RFC's have fallen through the
cracks towards complete implementation without operational concerns have
been addressed.  John Curran agreed to make sure that at least a
fraction of new RFC's are read for operational impact.  Bill Manning
agreed to do some reviewing, but cannot do the whole job himself.

There is a need for a working group to deal with a policy routing
description language, Many of the routing efforts (BRG, SDRIP, etc.,)
are defining a need for a common routing policy language.  ORAD needs to
form a liaison with the protocol developers to help define such a
language.

The Operations Area working groups were discussed and a new scheme were
proposed by Dan Long.  The intentions and actual planning according to
this scheme will continue on email.

The need for a tunnel coordination working group was discussed.  There
are MBONE tunnels which could be removed.  TUBA tunnels may in the
future need coordination for the same reasons.  ORAD did not see a need
for such a working group in the immediate future.


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CIDR issues were treated with respect to timeliness.  Will CIDR
deployment be in time before router hard- and software start to hit the
limits or has this already begun to happen.  There is a need to find
adequate measurements here.  ANS is doing some investigation within this
area.

Operational Statistics Working Group (OPSTAT)

Reports on current effort in deploying the OPSTAT model (RFC1404)
revealed some work.  RIPE NCC have a tool known as Monster which could
be adapted but manpower is lacking.  Craig Haney from Sprint has written
a PERL parser.  Some other efforts are also known.  FARNET had promised
funding if a site could be found to take on the implementation work.

Some problems with the RFC1404 storage format were reported and it was
decided to make the necessary changes to fix them.

Henry Clark from OARnet has done some implementation work of the OPSTAT
client/server draft specification.  This was discussed and Ittai
Hershman/ANS reported on a similar tool implemented by Merit.  The
specification of the client/server query language was extensively
discussed.

Finally it was agreed that the SNMP/MIB people should be contacted with
respect to variables needed in statistical gathering but which as of
today are not present in the Internet Standard MIB.



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