CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by John Veizades/FTP

Minutes of the Service Location Protocol Working Group (SVRLOC)

The meeting began by opening the floor to questions on the current
status of SVRLOC's work.

Sun made a presentation on NIS+ which is being offered to the IETF along
with the rest of the Sun ONC work (RPC, XDR and NFS) for standardization
under the IETF umbrella.  The presentation was requested to understand
the NIS+ work and to see if the current service location proposal will
solve the issues addressed by NIS+.

The following is a list of issues that need to be resolved before the
document can go down the standards track:


   o An architectural overview needs to be added to the document.

   o Security considerations for authentication, privacy and
     spoofing---some sort of awareness of these issues needs to be added
     to the document.

   o Addresses---to be able to run over multiple network protocols, a
     standard for address encoding needs to be put in place.
     Suggestions included taking the defined address specifications in
     the sockets.h file and registering them through the IANA.

   o A length field should be in the packet.

   o Language and character sets---the locale should be sent using the
     ISO standard locale encoding, and character sets would be specified
     for every string.  The suggestion was made that services may want
     to register one service entity for each language instances that is
     available.  For instance, if a particular service supports French,
     English and Spanish, one service would be registered for each
     language, and user agents requesting a particular language would be
     able to filter on the language type to acquire the appropriate
     service for their language needs.

   o Rendezvous mechanism for specifying the end point of the answering
     service (address, port and other information)---the rendezvous
     information is used by the particular user agent service stub to
     make the connection to the appropriate service endpoint on the
     service agent.  This will also allow directory agents to respond
     for service agents, and for service agents to return
     service-specific rendezvous information to the upper layer
     protocol.  For example:
        address type=IP; address:  90.1.0.12; port:  98; service info:

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                                   ATS3=0
     would be a string that may be returned from a modem pool to be used
     by the serial line service to send configuration information to the
     modem pool server to get the particular type of service specified
     by the user agent.

   o Examples for several common services (e.g.  printing, FTP, mail
     server, name server, and network management trap).

   o Multicast addresses should be acquired from the IANA.


A technical presentation was given in Thursday's open plenary, outlining
the service location protocol and giving status information on the
service location protocol proposal.  The work was well received by the
audience.

The latest version of the documents can be found on:
wco.ftp.com/resloc.


Attendees

Steve Alexander          stevea@lachman.com
Stefan Braun             smb@cs.tu-berlin.de
Eric Fleischman          ericf@act.boeing.com
Thomas Kaeppner          kaeppner%heidelbg.vnet@ibmpa.ibm.com
Scott Kaplan             scott@wco.ftp.com
Andrew Knutsen           andrewk@sco.com
John Larson              jlarson@parc.xerox.com
Tony Li                  tli@cisco.com
Paolo Malara             malara@crs4.it
Chuck McManis            chuck.mcmanis@eng.sun.com
John Veizades            veizades@wco.ftp.com
Steven Waldbusser        waldbusser@andrew.cmu.edu



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