CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by John Veizades/FTP Minutes of the Service Location Protocol Working Group (SVRLOC) The Service Location Working Group held two sessions at this IETF meeting. The first session focussed on the Internet-Draft submitted by the chairs, ``Service Location Protocol.'' This discussion was divided into several areas: o The Base Protocol Specification o Authentication o Predicate Language o Directory Agents The base protocol specification had several issues in the size of several fields. The locale field was extended to a 16-bit value with the need to look at any international specifications that define language specifiers. (The chair found that ISO 639 defines many language specifiers and that the mime working group is working on extending this work to include dialects of spoken languages increasing the size of this field to four characters.) The group made the recommendation that the specification writers look at the work that the Common Authentication Technology Working Group (CAT) is doing as a way of defining the authentication types and also to look at the GSS API work. The authentication length field was increased to 16 bits. The predicate language was hashed out, and the addition of wild card methods on strings was added. The conditional operators that were accidentally left out of the specification were also added. The afternoon session was devoted to the discussion of the directory agent interaction in the protocol. The issues that needed to be resolved were that the directory agent is the point of scaling in the protocol and that it is necessary that the directory agents need to solve all the scaling issues. The following protocol was defined for directory agents: o Directory agents have a concept of a scope that they are responsible to support. The scope is a text string. Samples of a scope would be ``engineering'' or ``marketing.'' During a directory agent discovery, the directory agent passes to the user agent the scopes that are available on the network and the scope(s) that they are acting for. The user agent needs to find the directory agent that supports the scope they are searching in. This is done by sending a service query with the directory agent and the scope that is interested in the appropriate directory agent responds. o Directory agents need to find themselves and exchange the scopes that they know of. o Service agents need to register with all directory agents that support the scope they have chosen to be in. The next question is, ``How do directory agents and sites advertise themselves in the Internet at large?'' The proposals that were considered were: o Advertising in a directory service like DNS or X.500, and o Advertising in a resource discovery service like gopher or WWW. The discussion continued with the statement that sites may want to advertise their service in several taxonomy domains, these include a white pages system indexed by the public name of the advertiser and/or a yellow pages type service indexed by service provided, geographical location, etc. The chairs will post an updated draft by the end of the year. Implementation of this protocol is proceeding at FTP Software and other implementors are being sought out. Attendees Andy Adams ala@merit.edu Steve Alexander stevea@lachman.com James Allard jallard@microsoft.com Frank Ciotti frankc@telxon.com Chuck de Sostoa chuckd@cup.hp.com Mei-Jean Goh goh@mpr.ca Roland Hedberg Roland.Hedberg@rc.tudelft.nl Kevin Jackson kjackson@concord.com Scott Kaplan scott@ftp.com Gordon Lee gordon@ftp.com Glenn Mansfield glenn@aic.co.jp Matt Mathis mathis@psc.edu Mike Ritter mwritter@applelink.apple.com Michael Safly mike.safly@msfc.nasa.gov Martin Schulman schulman@smtp.sprint.com Robert Stevens robs@join.com Larry Tepper ltepper@compatible.com John Veizades veizades@ftp.com Walter Wimer walter.wimer@andrew.cmu.edu