Subject: [Netconf] Summary and AIs from NETCONF WG session on March 31, 2011 (Prague)

From: "Ersue, Mehmet (NSN - DE/Munich)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2011 09:35:03 +0200

Dear NETCONF WG,

please find below a summary and action items from the NETCONF WG session
on March 31, 2011 in IETF 80 (Prague, Czech Republic): 

- We had approx. 30 participants in the 2 hour NETCONF session. 
- We reviewed the status of the WG.
- We went through the chartered WG items and had a good discussion and
review of the documents.

Status of the documents:
- The draft "With-defaults capability" is in RFC Editors Queue.
- The documents 4741bis and 4742bis are through IESG and now in RFC
Editors Queue.
- The work on following documents is ongoing and they have been
discussed in the session with their issues:
   - NETCONF Access Control Model (draft-ietf-netconf-access-control-03)
   - NETCONF System Notifications
(draft-ietf-netconf-system-notifications-03)

Discussion on chartered items:

NETCONF NACM:
(slides: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/80/slides/netconf-3.pdf)
Andy brought up the open issues for NACM.
Authentication text and objects have been removed from the document. The
authentication object will be developed in NETMOD WG. The NACM draft is
independent of this module.
AI: Andy will clarify the copy-config rules on the NETCONF ML.

Improved NACM rule specification, features/requirements:
(slides: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/80/slides/netconf-1.pdf)
Martin brought the issue of the missing mechanism to group related rules
and proposals for discussion.
NACM currently mixes who has access to the objects and makes
task/feature based rules difficult to maintain.
There are a few open issues which need discussion on the ML (see
slides).
AI: WG co-chairs will ask the ML to send comments on these issues (done)

NETCONF System Notifications:
(slides: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/80/slides/netconf-4.pdf)
The discussion in the session concluded to use
"ietf-netconf-base-notifications" as the module name.
The chairs asked the WG to speak up asap if there is any disagreement.
The draft needs some clarification text to address mailing list comments
and could go to WGLC soon.

NETCONF Notification over WebSocket Protocol: 
(slides: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/80/slides/netconf-2.ppt)
Tomoyuki Iijima presented on his ongoing work.
The discussion showed that there are doubts whether an additional
transport is needed to standardize.
Some of the session attendees found it useful to have a websocket based
transport.
The current draft supports only notifications. 
It has been proposed that the draft should be extended as a full
solution to be able to consider as a new NETCONF transport.
It needs also to be checked whether anybody else is interested to
implement.

AOB:
Update of RFC 5539 (NETCONF over TLS):
Prior to the meeting the editor of RFC 5539 (Mohamad Badra) proposed to
update NETCONF over TLS according the changes in 4742bis.
RFC 5539 uses the same EOM sequence as delimiter and the same security
considerations for 4742bis apply to RFC 5539 too.
The discussion showed that it is not easy to obtain a username from TLS
comparable to the solution in 4742bis and to fulfil the requirements in
4741bis concerning the username. Without an appropriate username NACM
cannot be used.
AI: The co-chairs decided to finalize active documents first. 
The chairs will ask M. Badra to look in 4741bis for the requirements on
the username handling (done).
M. Badra can prepare a draft with a proposed solution and bring into
discussion later.

Interop:
Prior to the session two ad-hoc demos have been announced to take place
after the NETCONF session.
(see http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netconf/current/msg06932.html)
The chairs asked in the meeting whether the WG is interested in an
official NETCONF protocol interop event, which could be organized timely
before the Quebec meeting.
AI: The chairs will send an email to the ML to clarify the level of
interest of the implementers on such an interop event (done).

Bert & Mehmet