CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Fred Baker/Advanced Computer Communications Minutes of the Point-to-Point Protocol Extensions Working Group (PPPEXT) PPPEXT Editor The PPPEXT Working Group has a new editor. Bill Simpson resigned as editor as of this IETF. The chair notes that Bill's technical contributions have been many and helpful in making PPP and its extensions clearly understood and interoperably implementable by many disparate organizations. We wish him well in his new endeavors. The new editor is Scott Wasson. The role of the editor is that of ``designated reviewer,'' responsible for readability, clarity of explanation, and consistency of language and technical approach among documents produced by this working group. Scott will work out with each author how they will interact, whether by Scott submitting comments or whether he edits the author's text. IESG In Basket Currently in the IESG's in basket are the following documents: o To Proposed Standard: - draft-ietf-pppext-dataencap-02.txt - draft-ietf-pppext-frame-relay-03.txt - draft-ietf-pppext-multilink-09.txt o To Draft Standard: - OSI CP (RFC 1377) - DECNET CP (RFC 1376) Status Report on the Compression Control Protocol and Associated Documents Compression is a major issue for ISOC at the moment. Motorola sent a letter to ISOC indicating that the CCP may infringe on one or more of its patents. Since ISOC (like ANSI and other organizations) requires that standards produced by our community be either patent-free or that the patent holder assure ISOC that it will negotiate reasonable terms with those who implement, the drafts cannot be approved for any status - including Informational RFC - at this point. ISOC is seeking to communicate with Motorola, but has to date not secured the necessary assurances. The patent numbers are 5,130,993, transmitting encoded data on unreliable networks, and 5,245,614, vocabulary memory allocation for adaptive data compression of frame-multiplexed traffic. This affects the following drafts: o draft-ietf-pppext-compression-04.txt o draft-ietf-pppext-bsd-compress-01.txt o draft-ietf-pppext-gandalf-00.txt o draft-ietf-pppext-hpppc-00.txt o draft-ietf-pppext-magnalink-01.txt o draft-ietf-pppext-predictor-00.txt o draft-ietf-pppext-stacker-01.txt NETBIOS CP Those who were working with the NETBIOS CP indicate that the current draft (draft-ietf-pppext-netbios-fcp-05.txt) meets their needs and should be published as a Proposed Standard. Synchronous Data Compression Consortium Stuart Venters made a presentation regarding the activities and conclusions of the SDCC, a consortium of DSU/CSU vendors who would like to use a variation on the PPP Compression Control Protocol to interconnect compressing DSUs. This is an unusual application: HDLC data (potentially PPP but potentially also X.25, Frame Relay, or other HDLC protocols) is encapsulated in PPP datagrams containing compressed data. There can be interesting circumstances wherein a device calls a system using a compressing DSU, and the DSU seeks to open a PPP session before passing data on to the target system. These would, of course, be temporary occurrences. Even if the LCP came up and was authenticated, the DSU would recognize the situation when the SDCC's NCP for the case failed negotiation. The SDCC would like to modify the LCP for use in this circumstance, to reduce the negotiation to a single message exchange. This was discussed, and SDCC agreed to further consider the viability of this. Primarily, the SDCC wished to know whether the PPP community felt that they should pursue public adoption of the standard. Our belief is that we have considerable expertise to offer the SDCC in designing the application, and a vested interest in their getting it right (our implementations will at least occasionally chat with theirs). Therefore, we recommend that the SDCC use the IETF as a forum for this development. AppleTalk CP Brad Parker spoke about the text changes he has published in a revision of the AppleTalk NCP; he is updating RFC 1378 for advancement to Draft Standard. AppleTalk has been a problem in PPP interoperability, due to incomplete or incorrect implementations. The draft seeks primarily to clarify wording to remedy this situation. This work will continue on the list. Callback Procedure Gurdeep Singh Pall, speaking for Narendra Gidwani, described a proposed callback procedure to be used in authentication. The idea is that there may be several numbers that the authenticator can call the authenticatee at, among which the authenticatee might select. There is also often a delay before which there is no point in calling: the modem has not turned around. The procedure allows for the authenticatee to offer a set of call addresses and a minimum delay before calling. This will be pursued as a modification of the LCP callback option. Internet Protocol CP Gurdeep went on to describe some concerns that Microsoft has with the IPCP. Microsoft would like additional options to describe primary and secondary DNS and NETBIOS name server addresses, time server addresses and for registering IP multicast usage. The Routing and Internet Area Directors, being all present, and the working group consensus indicated that protocols (DHCP and IGMP) exist for this purpose, placing these options out of scope. Gurdeep has agreed to update the IPCP with implementation notes in preparation for advancement to Draft Standard. There was consensus to add a boolean option to IPCP to request forwarding of network and subnet broadcasts. Alan Steele is planning a related effort to update the Van Jacobsen compression algorithm described in RFC 1144. Authentication David Carrel reported on the status of the sub-group working on authentication. The status is essentially that some agreements have been hammered out, but are not at this point documented. David will post an Internet-Draft concerning authentication requirements by 1 September. Banyan Vines CP Fred Baker presented Steve Senum's BVCP draft in a few overheads, and led a review. Some typos were pointed out (which will be pointed out in mail on the list) and a proposed BV-Routing option was discussed. Steve will continue development of the draft on the list.