The Director's Message The 34th meeting of the IETF was held in Dallas, Texas from December 4-8, 1995. It turned out to be the second largest meeting of the IETF in our seven year history with over 1000 registered attendees. Interestingly, for the past three years, the last meeting of the year has been the largest. First timers continue to make up a third of our attendance at each meeting, and while most attend only one meeting, a significant number continues to attend IETF meetings. Of the 281 first time attendees at the Danvers meeting, 16% attended the meeting in Stockholm, and increased to 28% by Dallas, joining with 19% of the Stockholm first timers and the 346 folks attending their first IETF meeting... which means that 45% of the Dallas registrants attended their first IETF meeting in 1995. Acknowledgments I would like to thank MCI Telecommunications for hosting this meeting of the IETF, and for providing the terminal room facilities, and arranging a social event that will be remembered for quite some time. I would especially like to recognize the efforts of Therese Cline and John Stewart, and the other folks from MCI who worked around the clock to support the attendees. Thanks also to Jim Martin, who came by primarily to see an IETF terminal room in action, and ended up providing technical assistance throughout the week. The configuration of the terminal room facilities depends a great deal on the generosity of equipment vendors and service providers, and I want to thank the following organizations for their contributions and assistance: Sun Microsystems Workstations and mbone router DigitalLink Corporation Muxes Boise Cascade Paper and printing supplies Cisco Systems Equipment Anixter Hubs Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha 250 and Polycenter software Network General Corporation Sniffer Farallon Computing LocalTalk/Appletalk equipment Hewlett-Packard Printers No Hype -- Prototype It was just 16 months ago that Scott Bradner and Allison Mankin, co- chairs of the ad-hoc IPNG Area, reported that a decision had been made on the next generation of IP. This announcement resulted in a burst of activity as new working groups formed, system designs were proposed and discussed (oh yes, and revised :-), and Internet-Drafts were written. Finally, a set of IPNG documents were submitted to the IESG to be considered as Proposed Standards. The plenary technical presentation was a status report on IPNG development. Jim Bound (Digital Equipment Corporation) assembled a group of people who had implemented various components of the IPNG system, and organized a panel presentation to update the IETF on their progress, especially the results of their testing. I am amazed at how much has been accomplished in a relatively short period of time. Please make a note to review the technical presentation section of the proceedings. What is the IETF? Who are we? Who are they? What are they to us? What are we to them? As the IETF has grown and evolved, many have attempted to answer this question. These questions have been asked before, but the importance of having the answers became paramount in December, 1992 when the roles and responsibilities of the IESG and IAB were redefined, changing our structure and organization. One of topics discussed during the IESG Open Plenary centered on the Poised Working Group, the status of its documents and its discussions. Interestingly enough, the primary discussion topic was not Intellectual Property Rights, but focused on defining the IETF, documenting its purpose, goals, and the role it plays in the Internet Community. Additionally, there is a growing desire to document what it means to be in the IETF, clarifying acceptable behavior and assumptions that are made, particularly with respect to disclosing property rights information, participating as an individual and not as a organizational representative. The topic expands when attempting to define the IETFÕs relationship with other organizations, particularly the Internet Society. There are questions as to what exactly does it mean to be under the auspices (umbrella) of the Internet Society, and how the relationship can be beneficial to the IETF. The Poised95 Working Group has three Internet-Drafts: one documents the IETF Standards Process, one which documents the Nominations Committee process, and a new one which attempts to identify the various organizations with whom the IETF has a relationship, and documenting what the relationship is, as well as how it works. I encourage everyone to read the Internet-Drafts, especially when a Last Call is issued. These documents will describe what the IETF is, what is does, and how it does it. This is one set of documents that concern all of the IETF. Increasing Meeting Fees The subject of IETF meeting fees, and the need to increase them, was raised by Paul Mockapetris, Chair of the IETF. The fees have remained the same since they were first levied, though the Secretariat costs continue to rise. Due to the high costs of providing terminal room and multicasting services, the Secretariat has assumed financial responsibility for some items, items that were traditionally handled by the host. The concept of host-less meetings will result in a substantial increase in the cost of a meeting. The level of government funding will continue to decrease, approaching zero. This topic has been discussed before. In Danvers, it was suggested that the meeting fees increase by $100, and that those funds be used to subsidize the terminal room costs. The consensus at the Open IESG Plenary was to increase fees. Future Meetings The next IETF meeting is scheduled for March 4-8, 1996 in Los Angeles, California. This meeting will be setting a new first as it will be a host- less meeting. The terminal room will be provided by Interop, and we will be contracting out for multicast support as we did for Dallas. In another first for the IETF, we will be meeting in conjunction with INET '96 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This meeting will be held June 24-28, 1996. This is not a joint meeting per se, but both groups will be in the conference center. Additionally, INET will be providing a terminal room to be shared by both IETF and INET meeting attendees. We are returning to San Jose, California from December 9-13, 1996 for our final meeting of the year. There is no host for this meeting, and we plan to contract out for the terminal room and multicast support. The 1997 spring meeting will be held in Memphis, Tennessee the week of April 7-11. Our local host is Federal Express. See? It's never too late to volunteer to host a meeting! :-) Information on future IETF meetings can be found in the file 0mtg-sites.txt which is located on the IETF Shadow Directories. Alternatively, you can check the IETF Home Page on the WEB. Our URL is: http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us Stephen Coya IETF Executive Director The IESG and IETF have been very active since the Stockholm IETF Meeting last July: 189 Internet-Drafts, 35 Protocol Actions, and over 50 RFCs. Between the IETF meetings in Stockholm and Dallas, seven working groups were created: 1. Entity MIB (entmib) 2. Receipt Notifications for Internet Mail (receipt) 3. Guide for Internet Standards Writers (stdguide) 4. Common Indexing Protocol (find) 5. SNMP Agent Extensibility (agentx) 6. Public-Key Infrastructure (X.509) (pkix) 7. Application MIB (applmib) and five working groups concluded: 1. Network Information Services Infrastructure (nisi) 2. Operational Statistics (opstat) 3. Generic Internet Service Description (gisd) 4. Notifications and Acknowledgements Requirements (notary) 5. Responsible Use of the Network (run) Additionally, 54 RFC's have been published since the Stockholm IETF meeting in July, 1996: RFC Status Title RFC1815 I Character Sets ISO-10646 and ISO-10646-J-1 RFC1816 I U.S. Government Internet Domain Names RFC1817 I CIDR and Classful Routing RFC1818 S Best Current Practices RFC1819 E Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST2) Protocol Specification - Version ST2+ RFC1820 I Multimedia E-mail (MIME) User Agent Checklist RFC1821 I Integration of Real-time Services in an IP-ATM Network Architecture RFC1822 I A Grant of Rights to Use a Specific IBM patent with Photuris RFC1823 I The LDAP Application Program Interface RFC1824 I The Exponential Security System TESS: An Identity-Based Cryptographic Protocol for Authenticated Key-Exchange (E.I.S.S.-Report 1995/4) RFC1825 PS Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol RFC1826 PS IP Authentication Header RFC1827 PS IP Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) RFC1828 PS IP Authentication using Keyed MD5 RFC1829 PS The ESP DES-CBC Transform RFC1830 E SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large and Binary MIME Messages RFC1831 PS RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol Specification Version 2 RFC1832 PS XDR: External Data Representation Standard RFC1833 PS Binding Protocols for ONC RPC Version 2 RFC1834 I Whois and Network Information Lookup Service Whois++ RFC1835 PS Architecture of the WHOIS++ service RFC1836 E Representing the O/R Address hierarchy in the X.500 Directory Information Tree RFC1837 E Representing Tables and Subtrees in the X.500 Directory RFC1838 E Use of the X.500 Directory to support mapping between X.400 and RFC 822 Addresses RFC1841 I PPP Network Control Protocol for LAN Extension RFC1842 I ASCII Printable Characters-Based Chinese Character Encoding for Internet Messages RFC1843 I HZ - A Data Format for Exchanging Files of Arbitrarily Mixed Chinese and ASCII characters RFC1844 I Multimedia E-mail (MIME) User Agent checklist RFC1845 E SMTP Service Extension for Checkpoint/Restart RFC1846 E SMTP 521 reply code RFC1847 PS Security Multiparts for MIME: Multipart/Signed and Multipart/Encrypted RFC1848 PS MIME Object Security Services RFC1850 DS OSPF Version 2 Management Information Base RFC1851 E The ESP Triple DES-CBC Transform RFC1852 E IP Authentication using Keyed SHA RFC1853 I IP in IP Tunneling RFC1854 PS SMTP Service Extension for Command Pipelining RFC1855 I Netiquette Guidelines RFC1856 I The Opstat Client-Server Model for Statistics Retrieval RFC1857 I A Model for Common Operational Statistics RFC1858 I Security Considerations for IP Fragment Filtering RFC1859 I ISO Transport Class 2 Non-use of Explicit Flow Control over TCP RFC1006 extension RFC1860 I Variable Length Subnet Table For IPv4 RFC1861 I Simple Network Paging Protocol - Version 3 - Two-Way Enhanced RFC1862 I Report of the IAB Workshop on Internet Information Infrastructure, October 12-14, 1994 RFC1863 E A BGP/IDRP Route Server alternative to a full mesh routing RFC1864 DS The Content-MD5 Header Field RFC1866 PS Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 RFC1867 E Form-based File Upload in HTML RFC1868 E ARP Extension - UNARP RFC1869 S SMTP Service Extensions RFC1870 S SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration RFC1871 B Addendum to RFC 1602 -- Variance Procedure RFC1880 S INTERNET OFFICIAL PROTOCOL STANDARDS