Operational Requirements Area

Director


   o Scott Bradner:  sob@harvard.edu


Area Summary reported by Scott Bradner/Harvard and Mike O'Dell/UUNET

Meetings of five Operational Requirements Area working groups and two
BOFs were held during the 29th IETF meeting in Seattle, Washington.



Internet Accounting 2 BOF (ACCT2)


Reports were presented by Cyndi Mills and Nevil Brownlee summarizing the
work of the old Internet Accounting Working Group (ACCT) (which was
terminated in order to gain research experience).  Mike Kogut and
Shoshana Loeb reported on AMADNS. Discussions on the charter for a new
accounting working group were started and will continue on the mailing
list.  Proposed goals for the working group include finishing up the
work of ACCT (publish an accounting architecture document and define a
meter services MIB), and then extend the accounting model to handle
accounting for applications as well as for lower layers.



Establishing a Forum for Operational Issues BOF (OPERA)


The BOF discussed the need for an international platform to deal with
operational issues related to services above the network level.  Several
issues were identified, and several potential international bodies to
discuss these kind of issues were identified.  The IEPG
(Intercontinental Engineering and Planning Group) charter was presented.
Discussions resulted in the following recommendation:



     The IEPG should serve as the platform for Internet operators to
     discuss operational issues of all kinds, and to coordinate
     services.  The IETF is the platform where operational
     requirements and standards are discussed and defined.  Although
     it is acknowledged that the borderline between the IETF and
     IEPG will not always be this sharp, it is recommended that this
     distinction be followed as close as possible.  Input from IEPG
     to IETF (and vice versa) is, of course, essential for both
     bodies.

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Benchmarking Methodology Working Group (BMWG)

The group reviewed the current drafts ``Benchmarking Methodologies for
Network Interconnect Devices'' and ``Benchmarking Methodologies:  Test
Frame Formats'' and reached consensus about the final changes required.
The edited drafts will be reviewed by the list in the next 60 days.
Some discussion of planning for the next milestones was held and will be
finalized by July.


CIDR Deployment Working Group (CIDRD)

The group reviewed the current status of CIDR/BGP4 deployment and
identified what needs to be done to move forward.  The urgent need is to
have ASs advertise CIDR routes and withdraw more specific routes in
order to reduce routing table size.  The urgency must be understood,
work needs to be done with the ASs to deploy CIDR, and proxy aggregation
needs to be done for stub-ASs.  Aggregation guidelines were discussed
and one obvious conclusion is that proxy aggregation for stub-ASs can be
done now.  The group also discussed the issues of allocating CIDR blocks
by NSPs and decided that guideline documents will be produced.  The tool
of assigning addresses in VLSM was introduced as a facility for network
sites to use addresses more efficiently.  A report evaluating various
routers' capability of supporting VLSM was given.  Most of the routers
tested do not have full support yet.  The result needs to be passed to
the router vendors to have the function added.


Network Joint Management Working Group (NJM) and Network
Status Reports (NETSTAT)

Summary not submitted.


Operational Statistics Working Group (OPSTAT)

It was reported that a statistics server and two statistics-gathering
implementations are under way.  All three use RFC 1404 to define the
data file format.  Experience gained during this work indicates that
revisions to RFC 1404 should be made.  The group agreed that, in
addition to a draft of a revised RFC 1404, other necessary documents
included ``Operational Statistics Server and Client'' and an FYI
document, ``What kinds of operational statistics are most useful?''



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