Internet Accounting 2 BOF (ACCT2) Reported by J. Nevil Brownlee/University of Auckland and Cyndi Mills/BBN Introduction Nevil Brownlee gave a short presentation covering the history of the concluded Internet Accounting Working Group (ACCT), outlining the Internet accounting model and explaining the demand for an accounting standard. Working Group Charter A charter for the proposed Internet Accounting 2 Working Group had been sent to the mailing list before this meeting. The group reviewed the proposal and agreed that a working group should be chartered, with activities as follows: o Submit Accounting Meter MIB as a Proposed Standard at next meeting o Publish Accounting Architecture as an Informational RFC o Revise Accounting Background (RFC 1272) as necessary o Draft accounting data file formats o Extend Accounting Model to cover application services, e.g., FTP, WWW Before the next IETF meeting: o Jim Barnes and Sig Andelman will review the Accounting MIB o John Vollbrecht will review the architecture draft o Shoshanna Loeb and Mike Kogut will produce a draft data file format o Henry Sinnreich and Shoshanna Loeb will draft extensions for higher-level protocols Accounting Meter MIB and General Discussion Nevil Brownlee gave a short presentation on the Accounting MIB, which was followed by an interesting general discussion. Four people present were seriously interested in implementing the MIB. Parallels with RMON MIB were noted, but the RMON approach is ``best effort'' and is intended for performance, not for the stricter statistics required for accounting. Hub vendors would like to see cooperation between accounting and RMON MIB so as to reduce the number of MIBs. It was suggested that both MIBs might run (as separate views of common data) on a common RMON implementation engine. The working group will continue interaction with RMON and NASREQ and other groups requiring accounting support. Common file formats will allow post processing by common billing and statistics applications. It was noted that the collection process was already a point of commonality, but the file format is desirable for delayed storage and processing. There was considerable interest in application level accounting. One way to do this would be an application level MIB in service hosts. It will be important to unify the reporting and collection data formats so that same post-processing applications can be used for all services, including transaction-based services. A single application MIB would be better than a different MIB for every application. Service providers (there are over 50 altogether) expressed interest in using the Accounting MIB for settlements. They need a uniform automated way of providing settlements between carriers.