CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by John Veizades/FTP Software

Minutes of the Service Location Protocol Working Group (SVRLOC)

The Service Location Working Group met at the December '94 IETF meeting
in San Jose California to discuss the following.


   o Changes to the Current Draft
      -  reorganization of the protocol header
      -  field size changes
      -  query example
      -  multiple addresses in the service instance
   o SCOPE
   o IPv6
   o Implementation Experience


Changes to the Current Draft

The changes in the current draft were described in detail.  They include
a change in the overall header field ordering to optimize the use of
certain fields and to align some of the fields.  The size of certain
fields has been expanded to take advantage of certain well known
constants like the address type which is now defined in the assigned
numbers RFC and authentication length from 8 to 16 bits.

The query example in the text was reviewed.

The service instance has been changed so that multiple addresses per
address family can be returned from the service or directory agent.


SCOPE

The current SCOPE mechanism was discussed and explained in detail
including the relationship between foreign scope and DNS.


IPv6

The differences in the Internet-Draft for IPv4 and IPv6 were discussed.
The main differences is in the service instance address formats.  There
was some concern over confusion that may arise between the IPv6 scope
concept and the service location scope concept.  The chair will add
statements on the differences between the two concepts in the IPv6
draft.

Other suggestions to the IPv4 and IPv6 drafts are to change the
distinguished attribute definition to add a numerical value as the index
mechanism into distinguished attributes rather than the text string in
the distinguished attribute.  This will allow for programmatic discovery
of networked services.


Implementation Experience

The implementation status was reviewed.  Only one group is currently
working on an implementation of the protocol.  The state of this
implementation is that it is almost completed.  This work has also been
discontinued.  Implementation experience has shown that this protocol
can be easily implemented on modern PC operating systems.


SVRLOC Mailing List

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There will be a message sent to the list with its new location.