CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by April Marine/NASA NAIC Minutes of the Network Information Services Infrastructure Working Group (NISI) Introductions Taking advantage of our first meeting in Europe, we took some time to introduce ourselves. The chairs were very happy that the group included so many new faces. In fact, the whole meeting benefited from the new perspectives brought by our European and other non-American participants. Document Discussions NISI had one Internet-Draft and one document proposal to discuss, and these discussions took up the bulk of the meeting. o ``Current NIC Interrelationships'' The current Internet-Draft aims to capture how the many different types of NICs currently interrelate. A draft drawing that breezed by the earlier discussion in Columbus, Ohio, brought forth much more discussion in Amsterdam. It was finally decided to modify the draft in a couple of ways. First, the one ``generic'' picture currently included will be scrapped in favor of at least three pictures depicting actual examples, each representing a different region, e.g. Europe, the US, and the Pacific Rim. Other areas are welcome, but were not initially discussed. Plus, a deeper discussion of the various roles different organizations acting as NICs play will be included. Other minor editorial suggestions were also made. o Paper on Coordinating Handoff of User Problems Between NICs The next document proposed was for recommendations regarding how to coordinate interaction between NICs when a user query requires the services of more than one organization. This also engendered an interesting discussion, with some feeling that as the net becomes more commercialized, ``customer service'' segments of it will interact less and less. So, it was agreed that the thrust of the document would be toward making recommendations as to how NICs would interact with each other i.e., leave the NIC-to-end-user interaction to each NIC. NICs would be encouraged to follow such recommendations as they choose. NISI recognizes that we can't tell the NICs what to do, only make suggestions. 1 Other Items Pat announced that the NIC profile information is now available via gopher. While it is now much easier to view the NIC information, we need to consider other means of keeping the information current. Pat will talk further with the InterNIC about this. Pushpendra Mohta of the InterNIC agreed to follow up with Pat. A suggestion was made to have a mailing list where NIC people could exchange e-mail on various problems. We have such a list, called nic-forum@merit.edu. We decided to try to jump-start discussion on the list. In addition, perhaps the InterNIC could mention the mailing list at their ``NIC Fest'' coming up. The problem of getting people to register IN-ADDR information once they have a net number assigned was mentioned. Ellen Hoffman said that some discussion of that could fit into the ``How to Connect'' document that the USERDOC2 Working Group will be working on. Wrap Up The meeting concluded with the chairs promising to solicit input, especially drawings of NIC relationships, from the attendees. Attendees Matti Aarnio mea@nic.nordu.net Jodi-Ann Chu jodi@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu Henry Clark henryc@oar.net David Conrad davidc@iij.ad.jp Jill Foster Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk Osten Franberg euaokf@eua.ericsson.se Ben Geerlings ben.geerlings@surfnet.nl Marcel Graf graf%dhdibm1.bitnet@vm.gmd.de Maria Heijne maria.heijne@surfnet.nl Ellen Hoffman ellen@merit.edu Per Jacobsen p.h.jacobsen@usit.uio.no Xander Jansen xander.jansen@surfnet.nl Brewster Kahle Brewster@wais.com Lothar Klein lothar.klein@gmd.de Steen Linden steen.linden@uni-c.dk John Lindsay lindsay@kingston.ac.uk Anne Lord anne@ripe.net Gary Malkin gmalkin@xylogics.com April Marine april@atlas.arc.nasa.gov Brian May Brian.May@mel.dit.csiro.au Peter Merdian merdian@rus.uni-stuttgart.de Pushpendra Mohta pushp@cerf.net Mark Prior mrp@itd.adelaide.edu.au 2 Juergen Rauschenbach jrau@dfn.de Joyce K. Reynolds jkrey@isi.edu Ulla Sandberg ulla@kiera.ericsson.se Srinivas Sataluri sri@internic.net Jennifer Sellers sellers@nsipo.nasa.gov Patricia Smith psmith@merit.edu Marc van der Noordaa noordaa@rare.nl Ruediger Volk rv@informatik.uni-dortmund.de 3