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- Subject: n-1-4-900.06
-
- 25th IETF Meeting in Washington
-
- On 16-20 November, the
- world's principal standards body for open
- computer internetworking standards met at
- Washington DC. More than seventy working groups
- drawing nearly 700 participants from around the
- world focussed on creating and evolving standards
- universally used by enterprise networks, including
- the thousands of networks constituting the global
- Internet. A total of 120 working group sessions
- were held over the five day period.
-
- The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) through its
- Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the
- standards making organ of the Internet Society, and
- produces the world's predominant standards for open
- interconnecting of information systems. These
- include the well-known TCP/IP network protocols, as
- well as a wide variety of messaging, network
- management, file transfer, directory, data inter-
- change, knowledge discovery, and gateway protocols
- to other kinds of networks and information systems.
-
- The IETF uses innovative techniques to support the
- work. Much of the work is done electronically
- through the Internet. A special terminal room of
- dozens of advanced networked workstations is
- specially built at the meeting site by the host
- organization. Video and audio from two concurrent
- IETF sessions is also continuously "multicast"
- through the network to more than 100 sites around
- the world via the Internet, with return audio. This
- allows effective remote participation.
-
- Key developments at this meeting included:
- specific alternative migration plans for addressing
- and routing to accommodate the exponential growth
- of the Internet; standards for using the In-
- ternetwork Protocol (IP) over many new transport
- technologies, especially the Asynchronous Transfer
- Mode (ATM); a broad array of new techniques for
- distributed information resources discovery and
- access across heterogeneous, autonomous networks;
- improvements in the IETF's own standards process;
- finalization of new multimedia messaging standards;
- a new suite of network management, mobile, and se-
- curity standards.
-
- The host of this meeting was the Sprint Corporation which
- operated the terminal room over its SprintLink Internet
- Service.
-
- The 26th IETF session meets in Columbus,
- Ohio USA in March 1993; the 27th is in Amsterdam,
- Netherlands in July 1993.
-
- For general information, please contact the
- Internet Society Secretariat, tel: +1 703 620 8990,
- fax: +1 703 620 0913, or <isoc@isoc.org>, or
- 1895 Preston White Dr, suite 100, Reston VA 22091
- USA.
-
- On Line IETF Information
-
- The Internet Engineering Task Force maintains up-to-date, on-line
- information on all its activities. This information is available via
- FTP through the NSFnet Service Center (NNSC) and through several
- ``shadow'' machines. These ``shadow'' machines may in fact be more
- convenient than the NNSC. Procedures for retrieving the information are
- listed below.
-
- Directory Locations
-
- Information pertaining to the IETF, its Working Groups and Internet
- Drafts can be found in either the ``IETF'' Directory or the
- ``Internet-Drafts'' Directory. To retrieve
- this information via FTP, establish a connection, then Login with
- username ``anonymous'' and the password requested by the system. This
- password will either be your login name or ``guest''. When logged in,
- change to the directory of your choice with the following commands:
-
- cd ietf
- cd internet-drafts
-
-
- Individual files can then be retrieved using the GET command:
-
- get <remote filename> <local filename>
- e.g., get 00README readme.my.copy
-
-