Operational Requirements Area Directors o Scott Bradner: sob@harvard.edu o Mike O'Dell: mo@uunet.uu.net Area Summary reported by Scott Bradner/Harvard and Mike O'Dell/UUNET Meetings of six Operational Requirements Area working groups were held during the IETF meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. Benchmarking Methodology Working Group (BMWG) The BMWG Working Group met to initiate an IP Providers Metric effort within the BMWG. Twenty-eight people attended. Guy Almes led the session. During the session the group discussed: o General criteria for metrics, o Specific kinds of metrics that need to be defined and for which tools need to be developed, and o Examples of technical, operational, and non-technical issues that would impact the usefulness of these metrics. The preponderance of effort was focused on considering practical measures of an IP `cloud' service that: (1) a user could measure from the periphery of the cloud, and (2) a provider could also measure. The hope is that this effort will result in a set of practical metrics and methodologies for measuring them that will benefit both providers and users and clarify their common understanding of the IP networks that make up the Internet. CIDR Deployment Working Group (CIDRD) CIDRD appropriately met in the ``Weapons Room'' at Stockholm. The usual statistics were presented. Of special note were figures which indicate that the growth of the routing table is again quite rapid. Bill Manning has been tracking the class A networks and has had considerable success in getting some network numbers returned. Geert Jan de Groot presented a paper on a clever mechanism for dealing with DNS when addresses are allocated on non-octet boundaries. Yakov presented a slightly revised RFC 1597. No document actions took place, but a Last Call for Address Ownership has been issued. The BCP track was discussed, and folks were advised to contact the IESG with their opinions. Guidelines and Recommendations for Security Incident Processing Working Group (GRIP) GRIP met twice during the Stockholm IETF meeting. The first session was used to discuss content for the incident response team document. The group plans to have an Internet-Draft by 1 November. The second session was spent discussing the outline for the vendor guidelines document. Operational Statistics Working Group (OPSTAT) The drafts `Revised Verions of 1404' and `Statistics Server' were reviewed. These have both had their last call on the mailing list, they will now be sent to the RFC Editor as Information RFCs. We have failed to collect enough material on `experience with using SNMP for network management' to produce a draft; this project has therefore been abandoned. The working group has now completed its charter activities and will close down. Routing Policy System Working Group (RPS) Cengiz Alaettinoglu presented the AS path expression extension to RIPE-181. Capability of AS macro names in the AS path expressions and making the interaction rule a recommendation instead of a requirement were agreed. Cengiz Alaettinoglu presented RPSL policy terms and five interaction rules between policy terms. The consensus was to go with one of the last two interactions, that is either the specification order rule or the combined rule. Craig Labovitz presented the RPSL dictionary which provides the extensibility to the language. Some people thought this was two steps ahead of today. Cengiz Alaettinoglu presented two syntax alternatives for rpsl, one which is elegant and new but requires a translation tool for RIPE-181 compatibility and another which is RIPE-181 compatible but may make tool builders' job more difficult. Daniel Karrenberg presented the short term and long term database models. David Kessens and Cengiz Alaettinoglu proposed two long term models, and it was agreed to go with the model that eliminated the source attribute and achieved consistency via the authorized registry idea based on the maintainer object. RWhois Operational Development Working Group (RWHOIS) The RWhois Operational Development Working Group met and discussed user authentication, secondary server protocol development, schema convergence, and deployment issues. On the authentication issue, it was decided that the RWhois development effort should look at kerberos as well as what comes out of the CAT Working Group. Suggestions were made on the secondary server and parental notification that will then be implemented. A very rough first draft was sent to RIPE to see if we can come to some sort of agreement on schema differences. At the conclusion, deployment plans were mentioned on how to replace the existing Whois server with RWhois.