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: 1 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 2