This is only a rough draft - Megan 04/13/92 IETF Internet Anonymous FTP Archives (IAFA) Minutes Co-Chairs: Peter Deutsch March 18, 1992 Alan Emtage 1) The Minutes of the previous meeting in Santa Fe were reviewed and accepted and the agenda for the current meeting was approved. 2) The group considered the question of whether a User Document for Anonymous FTP was still needed, given the publication of several new user guides in recent months. The general consensus was that it was since there is no current Internet RFC (FYI) covering the topic. April Marine (april@nisc.sri.com), Ellen Hoffman (ellen@merit.edu) and John Curran (jcurran@nnsc.nsf.net) have agreed to continue working on this document. 3) A detailed discussion of the Site Administrator's Document draft was held and its general ideas and focus approved. The following points were made: - The additional information for the archive suggested in the documentation should not reside in fixed locations. While recognizing that this places additional burdens on the information tool designers, it was thought that having fixed locations for this information would reduce its usability. Files with special names should be able to be deposited at any place in the archive and be retrieved for their information. - Some mechanism for a Time To Live (TTL) should be associated with the additional information being asked for in the archives to help control the problem of outdated information. - Investigations should be made into Universal Document Serial Numbers and Universal Document Identifiers and contact maintained with those working on these in the IRTF and other IETF areas. - A section should be included describing and summarizing existing projects which would be of use to site administrators, however care must be taken not endorse any specific project as "required". - Contact should be made and maintained with those doing work in this area: OSI (X.500) and CNI projects. The OSI document "Representing Public Archives in the Directory" was mentioned as one source of information for IAFA. It was recognized that the Library community is also very much involved in similar work. - Facilities should be included for the case where multiple logical archives are being maintained on one physical archive. - Possibility for a "Quality of Service" index to be included in the additional information. Problems with this were also noted since we do not want to be seen to be "endorsing" specific archives, but an approach that rates archives as "hobby", "official regional or midlevel archive", "university campus-wide archive" etc. may be of use. - A cross reference mechanism should be included for users to locate other related information. - Security concerns about the current draft were raised by CERT representatives. It was agreed that the authors should work with CERT in resolving these concerns. It was agreed that the authors would work to incorporate these changes and submit a follow-up draft to the IAFA mailing list as soon as possible. No new business was presented. Mailing List: iafa@cc.mcgill.ca Administrative Contact: iafa-request@cc.mcgill.ca