CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Edward Alcoff/Network Application Technology and Michael Erlinger/Harvey Mudd College Minutes of the Remote LAN Monitoring Working Group (RMONMIB) Agenda - Monday's Session o Presentation of new charter. o Discussion of experiences that may affect RFC 1271 changes. o Discussion of the four advancement options for RFC 1271. o Consensus on the particular option to be pursued for RFC 1271. o Discussion of areas of RFC 1271 that should be modified. The chair presented the new charter: The RMON Working Group is chartered to prepare a recommendation to the IESG evaluating RFC 1271 (the RMON MIB) with respect to the standards track. The recommendation will document implementation, interoperability, and deployment experience. If this experience suggest that changes should be made to the document, a new draft may be prepared. The recommendation will report one of four outcomes: 1. That RFC 1271 should be advanced from proposed to draft status, without changes (if no problems are found); 2. That a draft prepared by the working group, should replace RFC 1271, and be designated a Draft Standard (if only minor changes are made); 3. That a draft prepared by the working group, should replace RFC 1271, and be designated a Proposed Standard ( if major changes or feature enhancements are made); or, 4. That RFC 1271 should be designated as historic (if this technology is problematic). After some discussion, the consensus was that a draft prepared by the working group should replace RFC 1271 and be designated a Draft Standard, with minor changes to be made. Work on version 2 of RMON was delayed until the Spring IETF, to allow RFC 1271 to progress through the standards track. The RMON mailing list would also be polled for consensus on this strategy. Steve McRobert stated that the EtherStats group is incorrectly specified, with regards to dribble bits. Steve Waldbusser agreed and said that RMON implementors were developing RMON the way it made sense to and not the way the RFC specified. McRobert had posted several other items with regards to the EtherStats group and Waldbusser said that fixing them should be a relatively easy task. The Chair said that he would bring the information on this matter to the second session of the RMON working group for discussion. The RMON working group has also been tasked to write up RMON interoperability issues and information with regard to RMON implementation experience. Steve Waldbusser said that he would help coordinate this effort. Bob Stewart also suggested that the working group start a new features list for consideration for the next version of RMON. The chair then solicited extensions to the RMON that have been implemented by the vendors. This request will also be passed to the RMON mailing list. The chair then presented a list of fourteen areas for change to RFC 1271 to the meeting and the working group added three more for discussion. Editor's Note: An itemized list of changes is available via FTP or mail server from the remote directories as /ietf/rmonmib/rmonmib-minutes-93nov.txt. Refer to Section 1.2 of the proceedings for retrieval instructions. The floor was then opened to general questions and contributions. Thursday's Session The Thursday meeting was initially dedicated to discussion of the AMD (Ian Crayford and Steve McRobert) concerns with the Ether Stats table. By the time of the meeting these issues had been resolved by Steve Waldbusser and Steve McRobert. Basically, RMON implementations were doing the `right thing', but the RFC text was unclear. The agreed-upon changes were: o Remove the incorrect definition of alignment errors. o Define the term ``bad packets'' that is used frequently. o Mention that the collisions object is naturally dependent on the position of the probe in the network. One of Steve McRobert's issues that consensus could not be reached on was that the RMON's usage of the term jabbers was different than the 802.3 definition. Two possible solutions were proposed: 1. Deprecate the current object (and object ID) and re-create another with the right name. 2. Add text to the description field that says: ``Note that this is not the same as 802.3's definition of a jabber.'' Consensus on this issue will be sought on the mailing list. A broad discussion on RMON related to silicon implementation ensued. Two approaches materialized: 1. Wholesale modification of the current RMON specification, and 2. Keeping the current specification stable while acknowledging that RMON II will seriously consider hardware implementation issues, and therefore may not remain compatible with the current RMON. The working group agreed to the second strategy. One particular concern that was discussed for silicon implementations is that no performance gains can be achieved for filtering when the acceptType is set to acceptFailed. After some discussion it was identified as a general problem with formulas in ``Sum of Products'' form, and that outlawing them is probably not the right solution given that these are useful for a variety of filtering applications. The suggestion was made that RMON applications could warn the user that the SOP form selected when setting acceptType to acceptFailed can be very inefficient. Attendees Edward Alcoff oldera@nat.com Jim Barnes barnes@xylogics.com Bart Berger bart_berger@3com.com Ram Bhide ram@nat.com Andy Bierman abierman@synoptics.com Jia-bing Cheng cheng@ralvm6.vnet.ibm.com Chris Chiotasso chris@lightstream.com Frank Ciotti frankc@telxon.com Blair Copland copland@unt.edu Manuel Diaz diaz@davidsys.com Jonathan Didner jonb@bangate.compaq.com David Engel david@ods.com Michael Erlinger mike@jarthur.claremont.edu William Fardy billf@frontier.com Steve Garritano steveg@kalpana.com Christine Gressley gressley@uiuc.edu Robert Grow bob@xlnt.com Stuart Hale stu_hale@vnet.ibm.com Daniel Hansen danh@ngc.com John Hopprich hopprich@davidsys.com Jeff Hughes jeff@col.hp.com Kevin Jackson kjackson@concord.com Mark Kepke mak@fc.hp.com Kenneth Key key@snmp.com Michael Kornegay mlk@bir.com Cheryl Krupczak cheryl@empiretech.com William Kwan kwan@rabbit.com Dave Livingston squirrel@vnet.net Carl Madison carl_madison@3mail.3com.com Peram Marimuthu peram@wg.com Evan McGinnis bem@3com.com Steve McRobert steve.mcrobert@amd.com Tom Nisbet nisbet@fbsw.tt.com Steven Onishi sonishi@wellfleet.com David Perkins dperkins@synoptics.com Jon Saperia saperia@zko.dec.com Michael Scanlon scanlon@ftp.com Chris Shaw cshaw@banyan.com Timon Sloane timon@timonware.com Bob Stewart rlstewart@eng.xyplex.com Adam Stolinski stolinsk@cerf.net Kaj Tesink kaj@cc.bellcore.com Steven Waldbusser waldbusser@andrew.cmu.edu Thomas Walsh tomw@kalpana.com Alice Wang alice.wang@eng.sun.com Peter Wilson peter_wilson@3mail.3com.com Paul Woodruff pwoodruff@synoptics.com Henry Yip natadm!henry@uunet.uu.net