Director's Message The 28th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force was held in Houston, Texas, November 1-5, 1993. The meeting was co-hosted by SESQUINET and Rice University, and our thanks and appreciation go out to Bill Manning and to all the others who helped with the terminal room and the social event. I'm not sure how much longer the growth of the IETF meetings can continue. This was one of the top IETF meetings based on attendance with just over 635 registered attendees in Houston, making this the third largest meeting to date (slightly exceeding the Washington D.C. meeting which had 633 attendees). The number of first time attendees remained close to the 200 mark. There were 173 first time attendees at the Houston meeting (approximately 27%). About 100 people showed up for the Newcomers' Orientation on Sunday afternoon. Multicast IETF Meetings From the multicast perspective, things keep growing and growing, and it is impossible to guess how many people are ``listening in'' during the IETF meetings. There were more than 600 hosts on the receiving end of the Houston IETF multicast effort, up from approximately 400 hosts on-line during the Amsterdam meeting. The number of countries listening in stayed the same at 16. This technology is increasing the number of virtual attendees at these meetings, and coverage is not limited to the technical presentations and plenaries. The broadcast system is on wheels, and it is not uncommon to see the multicast volunteers (from the host group) wheeling a cart from working group to working group meeting! The IETF is Going ``Green'' Recognizing the concern for the environment, and the focus on electronic distribution of information for which the Internet is famous, the IETF consensus during the Thursday afternoon Open Plenary was to begin moving towards an electronic version of the meeting proceedings. This effort will reduce the paper requirements (saving trees) and the overall cost of printing and distributing the proceedings. The IETF Secretariat has always made the minutes available in the IETF shadow directories, but this is not an electronic version of the proceedings. They do not include the overheads from the technical presentations or those used during working group meetings. Obviously these must be included in the electronic proceedings. It is also understood that merely having files available for copying via FTP is not sufficient, and there is much more that can, and will, be done. The Secretariat is already examining what must be done in order to provide electronic proceedings. We are looking into how we might be able to store and provide the overhead materials, and we are looking into the hardware and software needed to scan the overheads and create some transportable file (i.e. Postscript). Many of the overheads used are created on workstations and computers that have the capability of producing Postscript files (and other formats as well), and this will be factored into our process. Obviously, there will be no shortage of suggestions and techniques (indeed, these are already coming in). It should be noted that this will be conducted as an experiment for the Seattle IETF meeting and there will be many changes suggested in the future as we gather experience and take advantage of new technologies and capabilities. The Secretariat will also be looking into how this information can be provided to the Internet community. Initially, we are planning to make everything available via gopher. Future plans include investigating the options of other mechanisms such as hyper-text and possibly distributing the proceedings on CD-ROM. In fact, depending on storage requirements and capabilities (not to mention demand), it might be possible to create a single CD with the proceedings for an entire year. I can just see it now, the IETF's Greatest Hits of 1994! There will be a change in the registration form for the Seattle IETF meeting in 1994. People will be asked to indicate if they want to receive a printed copy of the proceedings. Remember that this is an experiment, and make your choice appropriately. What a Year! This has been quite a year for the IETF. We began the year with IPNG candidate demonstrations in the terminal room at Columbus, status updates in Amsterdam, and the consolidation of SIP and PIP into a single effort by the November meeting. Another first-time event at the Columbus IETF meeting was the announcement of new members to the IESG and IAB. This was the first implementation of the selection process defined by the POISED Working Group. The IESG established a special ad-hoc Area for all the IPNG related working groups, and by November the IPNG Directorate had been announced, along with a six month plan of action. We held the first IETF meeting outside of North America, and future non-North American meetings are being planned as I write this message. Multi-casting is no longer a ``special'' component but an integral part of the meetings themselves. We've seen the number of receiving sites grow to more than 600 in over 15 countries. And the world has discovered the Internet. A significant number of books have appeared in bookstores, many articles are printed in the press, a cartoon appeared in the New Yorker Magazine (see the Amsterdam proceedings), and even Doonesbury has gotten into the act. More and more ``mainstream'' publications are carrying information on the Internet. More and more services are being offered and discussed. There are a number of new products (user interfaces) that are available to all Interneters; new tools and features are anticipated all the time, and are being worked on today. Capabilities we are only now beginning to conceptualize will probably be designed, implemented, distributed, and re-implemented (good ol' Version 2, eh?) by this time next year. Traditional concepts are being challenged and rethought as the general public moves into cyberspace. Consider electronic publication... this is/will be much more than merely having the articles and pictures, along with the cover and title pages, available on-line for electronic distribution or browsing. The entire concept of books will be re-examined as one considers the capabilities available today (and conceptualize what could be available tomorrow)... additional references, use of new technologies such as hypertext, knowbots, links to reference material and even more... two-way communication! Just imagine an application where a ``reader'' can ask the author to elaborate on a concept, clarify with additional examples, or even to submit additional queries. ``May you live through interesting times'' is an ancient Chinese curse. However, I am looking forward to more interesting times as new capabilities are provided and we improve our ability to perceive what cyberspace has to offer. Future Meetings The next IETF meeting will be in Seattle, Washington the last week of March (March 28 - April 1, 1993). This meeting is being hosted by NorthWestNet. Following Seattle, we will be travelling to Canada for the summer meeting which is scheduled to be in Toronto, Ontario from July 25-29, 1994. The final meeting of 1994 will be in the San Francisco Bay area; presently, the Secretariat staff are working with the host group to identify the meeting time and place. Once this information is known it will be broadcasted to the IETF Announcement mailing list. Note that information on future IETF meetings can always be found in the file /ietf/0mtg-sites.txt which is located on the IETF shadow directories. Stephen J. Coya Executive Director, IETF IETF Progress Report The IESG and IETF have been very active since the Amsterdam IETF Meeting last July; over 125 Internet-Drafts, 26 Protocol Actions, and over 65 RFCs. Between the IETF meetings in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Houston, Texas, there were four new working groups created: 1. Remote Lan Monitoring (RMBONMIB) 2. Generic Internet Service Description (GISD) 3. Internet Stream Protocol V2 (ST2) 4. Routing over Large Clouds (ROLC) and ten working groups were concluded: 1. FDDI MIB (FDDIMIB) 2. Bridge MIB (BRIDGE) 3. IP Over Large Public Data Networks (IPLPDN) 4. Internet Message Extensions (822EXT) 5. Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) 6. IEEE 802.3 HUB MIB (HUBMIB) 7. Token Ring Remote Monitoring (TRMON) 8. Chassis MIB (CHASSIS) 9. Host Resources MIB (HOSTMIB) 10. MIME-MHS Internetworking (MIMEMHS) Additionally, 66 RFCs have been published since the Amsterdam IETF meeting in July, 1993: RFC Status Title RFC1440 E SIFT/UFT: Sender-Initiated/Unsolicited File Transfer RFC1467 I Status of CIDR Deployment in the Internet RFC1477 I IDPR as a Proposed Standard RFC1478 PS An Architecture for Inter-Domain Policy Routing RFC1479 PS Inter-Domain Policy Routing Protocol Specification: Version 1 RFC1482 I Aggregation Support in the NSFNET Policy Routing Database RFC1483 PS Multiprotocol Encapsulation over ATM Adaptation Layer 5 RFC1484 E Using the OSI Directory to achieve User Friendly Naming (OSI-DS 24 (v1.2)) RFC1485 PS A String Representation of Distinguished Names (OSI-DS 23 (v5)) RFC1486 E An Experiment in Remote Printing RFC1487 PS X.500 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol RFC1488 PS The X.500 String Representation of Standard RFC1489 I Registration of a Cyrillic Character Set RFC1490 DS Multiprotocol Interconnect over Frame Relay RFC1491 I A Survey of Advanced Usages of X.500 RFC1492 I An Access Control Protocol, Sometimes Called TACACS RFC1493 DS Definitions of Managed Objects for Bridges RFC1494 PS Equivalences between 1988 X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies RFC1495 PS Mapping between X.400 and RFC-822 Message Bodies RFC1496 PS Rules for downgrading messages from X.400/88 to X.400/84 when MIME content-types are present in the messages RFC1497 DS BOOTP Vendor Information Extensions RFC1498 I On the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations RFC1500 S INTERNET OFFICIAL PROTOCOL STANDARDS RFC1501 I OS/2 User Group RFC1502 PS X.400 Use of Extended Character Sets RFC1503 I Algorithms for Automating Administration in SNMPv2 Managers RFC1504 I Appletalk Update-Based Routing Protocol: Enhanced Appletalk Routing RFC1505 E Encoding Header Field for Internet Messages RFC1506 I A tutorial on gatewaying between X.400 and Internet mail RFC1507 E DASS - Distributed Authentication Security Service RFC1508 PS Generic Security Service Application Program Interface RFC1509 PS Generic Security Service API : C-bindings RFC1510 PS The Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5) RFC1511 I Common Authentication Technology Overview RFC1512 PS FDDI Management Information Base RFC1513 PS Token Ring Extensions to the Remote Network Monitoring MIB RFC1514 PS Host Resources MIB RFC1515 PS Definitions of Managed Objects for IEEE 802.3 Medium Attachment Units (MAUs) RFC1516 DS Definitions of Managed Objects for IEEE 802.3 Repeater Devices RFC1517 PS Applicability Statement for the Implementation of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) RFC1518 PS An Architecture for IP Address Allocation with CIDR RFC1519 PS Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR): an Address Assignment and Aggregation Strategy RFC1520 I Exchanging Routing Information Across Provider Boundaries in the CIDR Environment RFC1521 DS MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies RFC1522 DS MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part Two: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text RFC1523 I The text/enriched MIME Content-type RFC1524 I A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information RFC1525 PS Definitions of Managed Objects for Source Routing Bridges RFC1526 I Assignment of System Identifiers for TUBA/CLNP Hosts RFC1527 I What Should We Plan Given the Dilemma of the Network? RFC1528 E Principles of Operation for the TPC.INT Subdomain: Remote Printing -- Technical Procedures RFC1529 I Principles of Operation for the TPC.INT Subdomain: Remote Printing -- Administrative Policies RFC1530 I Principles of Operation for the TPC.INT Subdomain: General Principles and Policy RFC1531 PS Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol RFC1532 PS Clarifications and Extensions for the Bootstrap Protocol RFC1533 PS DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions RFC1534 PS Interoperation Between DHCP and BOOTP RFC1535 I A Security Problem and Proposed Correction With Widely Deployed DNS Software RFC1536 I Common DNS Implementation Errors and Suggested Fixes RFC1537 I Common DNS Data File Configuration Error RFC1538 I Advanced SNA/IP : A Simple SNA Transport Protocol RFC1539 I The Tao of IETF - A Guide for New Attendees of the Internet Engineering Task Force RFC1540 S INTERNET OFFICIAL PROTOCOL STANDARDS RFC1541 PS Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol RFC1542 PS Clarifications and Extensions for the Bootstrap Protocol RFC1543 I Instructions to RFC Authors