CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by Peter Honeyman/UMich

DFS Minutes

The focal point of the Working Group continues to be wide-area NFS,
i.e., NFS-across-the-Internet.  Particular concerns fall into two areas:
congestion control and authentication/authorization.

Regarding the former, the consensus is that real progress on congestion
control for NFS lies in the hands of vendors, not in those of Internet
researchers and engineers.  Furthermore, many attendees doubt whether
the Working Group can do much to influence vendors to address problems
that are long-standing and well-known.

Along these lines, the following questions were raised:


   o Can NFS' congestion handling be fixed?
   o Could Sun fix it?
   o Could the IETF fix it without Sun's cooperation?
   o Is it legitimate to focus solely on Sun/RPC?
   o Would Sun work with the IETF? Should we care?
   o What role does AFS play?  Or the Guelph NFS on TCP?


The answers to these questions are not entirely obvious.  Nevertheless,
the Working Group is proceeding to document the shortcomings in
NFS/RPC/UDP as they affect good Internet-citizenship.

The Working Group urges backbone and regional network administrators to
monitor the ports used by NFS (principally UDP/2049) when gathering
network usage statistics; in this way, the IETF can gauge the severity
of the wide-area NFS problem.

Regarding authentication and authorization, the DFS Working Group deems
it appropriate to delegate such issues to the Working Groups dedicated
to these areas.  The DFS Working Group will enumerate its special
concerns and bring them to the attention of the appropriate security
Working Groups at the next IETF meeting.



                                   1






Attendees

Gregory Bruell           gob@shiva.com
Lida Carrier             lida@apple.com
Karen Frisa              karen.frisa@andrew.cmu.edu
Ken Hibbard              hibbard@xylogics.com
Russell Hobby            rdhobby@ucdavis.edu
Peter Honeyman           honey@citi.umich.edu
Ole Jacobsen             ole@csli.stanford.edu
Stev Knowles             stev@ftp.com
Carl Malamud             carl@malamud.com
Tony Mason               mason+@transarc.com
Matt Mathis              mathis@pele.psc.edu
Donald Morris            morris@ucar.edu
Chris Myers              chris@wugate.wustl.edu
Andy Nicholson           droid@cray.com
David O'Leary            oleary@noc.sura.net
Mark Stein               marks@eng.sun.com
John Veizades            veizades@apple.com
David Waitzman           djw@bbn.com
Carol Ward               cward@spot.colorado.edu



                                   2