CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by J. Nevil Brownlee/University of Auckland and Henry Clark/OARnet Minutes of the Operational Statistics Working Group (OPSTAT) Summary The group decided on a large number of small improvements to the OPSTAT statistics file format, and agreed to begin work on a new document, ``Statististics for Network People,'' which will set out recommendations on effective performance measures for various types of network links. An updated set of goals and milestones was also agreed upon. Revision of RFC 1404 Nevil Brownlee had circulated an initial draft of a modified BNF for the OPSTATS file. Corrections to this and other changes from the version in RFC 1404 were considered. Most of these were accepted as trivial, but the following provoked considerable discussion: o should be to allow for arbitrary names. o Colon, comma and semicolon should be allowed as field separators. o in should be moved forward so that it follows BEGIN_LABEL. o It is not clear how the field is to be used. o Within the data section there must be a one-to-one mapping of tag variables to data values. o The field is unnecessary. Instead we should use bps as the only units, and allow floating-point values for . A value of zero should mean `bandwidth unknown.' o Time resolution below one second would be useful. We should allow floating-point values for . o Should we attempt to provide for having separate variables of a sample stored in separate files? The present format stores them in rows (one row per ). Such a change was not considered to be worthwhile. o Should the file contain summary information about the quantity of data it contains? This might reduce the amount of work a statistics server has to do to decide on the size of a given set of data, but would not help in deciding whether such a set is complete. A statistics server implementation server might cache such information, but it does not seem worth trying to include this in the grammar. Nevil will circulate a new draft of the grammar with these changes incorporated. Once these have been commented on, a new revision of RFC 1404 will be produced as an Internet-Draft. It will include the above changes (and their corresponding changes to the examples in Appendix B) and editorial improvements such as correction of typos and polishing of the grammar. The ``Statistics for Network People'' Document This topic precipitated a discussion on the direction and purpose of the working group. This was agreed to be the development of good general-purpose network traffic planning tools, so as to make it simpler to produce one-off reports for problem solving as well as routine ones for long-term purposes. Everyone agreeed that it would be very useful to have a document which set out our recommendations on exactly what reports are most useful for various kinds of links. This would include a list of variables and their most useful sampling frequencies, together with comments on what effects one should look for when monitoring performance. This document will set out our `Statistics for Network People.' To launch this, everyone attending the meeting was asked to produce a page or so of this kind of information and post it to the mailing list. Nevil will collect this and edit it into a preliminary draft for further discussion and expansion. Revised OPSTAT Goals and Milestones o November 94 - Publish Internet-Draft of updated RFC 1404 o November 94 - Publish Internet-Draft of operational statistics server o November 94 - Publish initial Internet-Draft of ``Statistics for Network People'' o January 95 - Submit first two of above to IESG as Informational RFCs o March 95 - Revise ``Statistics for Network People'' Internet-Draft o March 95 - Discuss experiences with RFC 1404 file format Fractal Behaviour of Ethernet Packets Nevil Brownlee gave a brief presentation on a project at the University of Auckland which is continuing work on this topic published over the last four years. The goal here is to better understand the behaviour of packet network traffic and to make a mathematical model of it which is simple enough to use for real-time performance measures in real time.