CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Cyndi Mills/BBN ACCT Minutes o Status Review - Internet Accounting Background Document - Internet Accounting Architecture Document * Reporting Format * Rule Table * Meter Control - Liason with other Activities * SMDS * RLANMON MIB/OPSTATS * Interop BOF * SNMP/Security o Working Agenda - Consensus on Internet Accounting Background Document - Consensus on Internet Accounting Architecture (Reporting Format) * Work on Rule Table - SNMP Concerns * Discuss Sample MIB * Find a home for the MIB * Security Concerns Internet Accounting Background Document The Working Group agreed to recommend the advance of the document to informational RFC when the following corrections are made: The language about security requirements needs to be made more precise. The security area will provide a review of the amended text. Mention that the collection protocol is responsible for providing the necessary security, and therefore details of the security mechanisms are outside the scope of the document. An explanation of the trade-offs between accounting on entry and exit (or both) in a router should be included. This discussion should include examples of performance impact, billing for offered load vs. billing for delivered load, reconciliation of counts with neighbors, and fragmentation. Note that SMDS has chosen to count on exit only. 1 Internet Accounting Architecture The Accounting Architecture Document will be edited and then placed in the Internet-Draft area for access before the next meeting. The Architecture Document currently covers much of the material which was originally intended for the Meter Services Document. Mark Seger contributed many of the ideas and deserves special mention. In the reporting format, the current link-level address is an insufficient description. It is amended to be the ``adjacent address'', as in the address of the next lower protocol layer carrying the internet packet. This concept should be explained in the architecture. OSPF describes a similar adjacency and may provide a useful explanation. The motivation for the polling vs. interval reporting discussion in the architecture document should be made clearer. The rule table was reviewed and will be re-issued in another format. It was agreed that some form of rule pre-processor will probably be needed for network manager sanity. The manner in which the rule table for internet accounting forms a tree structure should be related to routing trees. The notation for the rule table should be amended. The binary pattern matching scheme should be made up of the character set ``0 1 *'', where ``0'' requires that the corresponding bit in the value to be searched be 0 for a match to occur, ``1'' that the bit be 1, and ``*'' where then corresponding bit may be either 1 or 0. The overall notation should be restructured to make the formation of a MIB easier. Because of the limitations of SNMP, it is difficult to access accounting information in table format. The appropriate set of protocol contortions needs to be investigated to return accounting information accurately and efficiently. The maximum lifetime of a flow should be determined by the managing entity rather than by the meter. The manager must be able to maintain a clean state - e.g., insure that a record is fetched and a new record is started for the same flow as an atomic operation. Also, the fetched record should be stored at least temporarily (for a ``short'' time, ``short'' to be determined by the manager) in order to allow for a retransmission (i.e., repeated request). The mechanisms for controlling data loss should be simplified to one or two parameters. If a meter is in danger of buffer overflow, probably the buffers will overflow and data will be dropped before the manager can take action anyway. This need further consideration. The flags grouping data need further definition. The notion that some group of flows may be categorized as ``expendable'' (discard these flows first) or ``essential'' (avoid discarding these flows if at all possible) should be further explained. 2 SNMP Concerns Jesse Walker wrote a sample MIB illustrating techniques that will be needed for expressing the accounting reporting format in terms that are compatible with SNMP. The possibility of including of the MIB as a subtree of the RLANMON MIB was discussed and rejected by the Working Group. The two chief reasons for this were: 1. The RLANMON MIB is currently progressing towards draft standard and the late addition of accounting might hinder their progress. 2. Devices other that remote LAN monitoring equipment also perform accounting functions, so it is inappropriate to demand that these other devices implement the remote LAN monitoring MIB. It was pointed out that the RLANMON MIB could be structured so that only the accounting option is present in the MIB, but this was not considered a sufficient reason for homing the accounting MIB to RLANMON. Internet Accounting requires that SNMP be able to dump tables in a more efficient and atomic fashion. FTP might be a preferred method of reporting data, but not all meters can be expected to support FTP due to memory limitations and abbreviated protocol stacks. There are concerns that SNMP security may not be sufficient for accounting purposes. Note change in location of list. To join the accounting Working Group list, please send mail to accounting-wg-request@wugate.wustl.edu with ``SUBSCRIBE'' in the subject line. To leave the accounting Working Group mailing list, send mail to the same address with the subject line ``UNSUBSCRIBE''. Attendees Gigi Chu gigic@hpspd.spd.hp.com Tracy Cox tacox@sabre.bellcore.com James Davin jrd@ptt.lcs.mit.edu Alan Emtage bajan@cc.mcgill.ca Shawn Gallagher gallagher@quiver.enet.dec.com Phillip Gross pgross@nis.ans.net Ittai Hershman ittai@nis.ans.net Mark Hoerth mark_hoerth@hp0400.desk.hp.com Mike Janson mjanson@mot.com Deidre Kostick dck2@sabre.bellcore.com Tim Lee-Thorp ngc!tim@uunet.uu.net Peter Liebscher plieb@sura.net Joshua Littlefield josh@cayman.com 3 Cyndi Mills cmills@bbn.com Dennis Morris morrisd@imo-uvax.dca.mil Bradford Parker brad@cayman.com Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil Ron Roberts roberts@jessica.stanford.edu Kary Robertson kr@concord.com.kr Gregory Ruth gruth@bbn.com John Scudder jgs@merit.edu Robert Shirey shirey@mitre.org Anil Singhal Roxanne Streeter streeter@nsipo.nasa.gov Ronald Tencati tencati@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov Claudio Topolcic topolcic@nri.reston.va.us William Versteeg bvs@nrc.com Jesse Walker walker@eider.enet@decpa.dec.com Gerard White ger@concord.com Osmund de Souza desouza@osdpc.ho.att.com 4