Subject: iFCP: Minutes authors' confcall Fri December 21st

From: Franco Travostino <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 16:10:42 -0500

Attendees:

Wayland Jeong, Troika Networks
Charles Monia, Nishan Systems
Franco Travostino, Nortel Networks
Josh Tseng, Nishan Systems

1. Debrief from IETF 52th IPS WG

Wayland was brought up to date on IPS news in SLC, including the new 
standard-track status for the IPS security draft. From the IESG plenary, FT 
took home a couple of guidelines against a) exceedingly long authors' 
lists, and b) exceedingly long standard-track documents. None of the above 
was seen as applicable to iFCP.

2. The road to iFCP 08.txt and Last Call

2.1 Detection of multiple broadcast servers

In SLC, Charles presented the new, TCP-based approach to realizing 
broadcast services. In a given zone, broadcast clients (many) and server 
(one) would be associated dynamically, with the latter advertising its 
presence to the iSNS. An external comment/concern was presented about two 
or more broadcast servers unduly coexisting in the same broadcast zone, as 
a result of misconfigurations, transient network partitions, etc. Since 
SLC, the authors have exchanged notes on how to best prevent this syndrome 
from happening. CM described the final solution, which entails a) adding 
"Broadcast Server" as an attribute in iSNS, b) administratively setting the 
broadcast server's WWN for a zone into iSNS, and c) having the broadcast 
server query the iSNS server, and match its own WWN with the one in the 
iSNS' reply, prior to actually joining the zone and start its broadcast 
duties.

2.2 Maintaining liveness

The aforementioned broadcast clients and server can use a keep-alive 
mechanism to check their connections. Such optional mechanism is best 
thought of as a FCP no-op, and purposely refrains from using the underlying 
TCP keepalive features. Liveness granularity can be dynamically set. Given 
that the broadcast sessions are undistinguishable from regular iFCP 
sessions after creation, the authors note that this optional liveness 
mechanism also applies to iFCP sessions. Regular iFCP sessions may use the 
liveness mechanism to refresh state in NA(P)T, firewall intervening boxes, 
and to assemble a somewhat meaningful history of IP prop times.

2.3 Update on Charles' latest changes regarding address translation model 
et al.

Work is well on its way, the authors will get a sneak preview the first 
week of January.

2.4 Security

Certificate words are the last known words still missing in action. JT and 
FT will exchange notes on a draft text, which they will then submit to the 
IPS security list for review.

2.5. Misc.

Happy Holidays

-franco

Franco Travostino, Director Content Internetworking Lab
Advanced Technology
Nortel Networks, Inc.
600 Technology Park
Billerica, MA 01821 USA
Tel: 978 288 7708 Fax: 978 288 4690
email: [email-masked]