iFCP: Minutes authors' confcall Fri December 21st

[Franco Travostino <travos@nortelnetworks.com>]

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: travos@nortelnetworks.com