CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Dave Crocker/Silicon Graphics Minutes of the NFS and ONC IETF Standards Effort BOF (ONC) Creation of the Service Applications Area suggests increased interest in the ``middleware'' category of support services, above transport and below specific application semantics. Sun Microsystems' Open Network Computing (ONC) suite of protocols provides a number of services in this arena and has an established user base. Sun has expressed an interest in pursuing IETF standardization of the ONC suite. At the Amsterdam IETF, two events were held to consider this possibility. The first was a Monday morning plenary presentation and the second was a BOF. The plenary presentation was to announce the discussions with Sun and to provide a basic introduction to the technology. The BOF continued the technical exposition, with detailed review of the ONC components, and then discussed the IETF's interest in standardizing the suite. The protocols that would be candidates include: o XDR, data representation o RPC, remote procedure call o NFS Version 2 & Version 3, file access o LOCKD, resource access coordination o NIS & NIS+, resource location XDR, RPC and NFS V2 have already been published as Informational RFCs. Further, they have been quite stable for a long time. Version 3 is quite new and has been implemented only on a few platforms; it is just being introduced to the NFS development community. NIS+ also is quite new and not fully documented. The BOF attendees seemed quite interested in ALL of the modules, though there was no clear agreement to standardize all of them. That is, there is interest in proceeding, taking things one step at a time. It was agreed to form a working group which would serially process the protocols, in whatever manner the working group felt best. It was expected that that would mean direct standardization of some of the protocols, without modification, and possibly changing some of the others prior to considering their standardization. Quite understandably, the BOF discussion also probed Sun's willingness to turn over control of the protocols to the IETF. (This is a formal requirement, documented in RFC 1310.) Sun has repeatedly offered its assurances that a) it understands the requirement, b) it is comfortable with it, and c) it wishes to work with the IETF on further growth of the suite. 1 Attendees Steve Alexander stevea@lachman.com James Allard jallard@microsoft.com Harald Alvestrand Harald.Alvestrand@delab.sintef.no Nutan Behki Nutan_Behki@qmail.newbridge.com David Borman dab@cray.com Piet Bovenga p.bovenga@uci.kun.nl J. Nevil Brownlee nevil@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz Brian Carpenter brian@dxcern.cern.ch David Conrad davidc@iij.ad.jp David Crocker dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu Geert Jan de Groot geertj@ica.philips.nl Dennis Ferguson dennis@ans.net Osten Franberg euaokf@eua.ericsson.se Robert Gilligan Bob.Gilligan@Eng.Sun.Com Terry Gray gray@cac.washington.edu Marco Hernandez marco@mh-slip.cren.edu Gerd Holzhauer Holzhauer1@applelink.apple.com Phil Irey pirey@relay.nswc.navy.mil Scott Kaplan scott@wco.ftp.com Peter Koch pk@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de Sylvain Langlois Sylvain.Langlois@exp.edf.fr John Larson jlarson@parc.xerox.com Chuck McManis chuck.mcmanis@eng.sun.com Keith Moore moore@cs.utk.edu Jun Murai jun@wide.ad.jp Clifford Neuman bcn@isi.edu Michael O'Dell mo@uunet.uu.net Drew Perkins ddp@fore.com Jim Rees Jim.Rees@umich.edu Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil Daisy Rose daisy@watson.ibm.com Marshall Rose mrose@dbc.mtview.ca.us Henry Sanders henrysa@microsoft.com Jon Saperia saperia@tay.dec.com John Stewart Antoine Trannoy trannoy@crs4.it John Veizades veizades@wco.ftp.com Noriko Yokokawa norinori@wide.ad.jp 2