Web Replication and Caching (wrec) Meeting November 11, 1999 at the 46IETF, reported by Ingrid Melve Agenda 1. Introductions, agree agenda (5 min) 2. Taxonomy document (10 min) Ingrid / Ian or Gary draft-melve-wrec-taxonomy-00.txt 3. Known Problems (15 min) John Dilley draft-ietf-wrec-known-prob-00.txt 4. Research Issues (10 min) Joe Touch draft-wrec-res-00.txt [NB: If there has been no progress on this document since July then we need to either drop it, publish it or move it to the re-chartered WREC]. 5. Emerging protocols (15 min) Alberto/Jeremy draft-cerpa-wrec-necp-00.txt 6. Other related work (10 min) Ivan Lovric draft-lovric-icp-ext-02.txt 7. Rechartering (30 min) We need to discuss re-chartering WREC. The mood I have gauged from the group is that we need to define a charter with some real work items and development in it. In particular, the areas of: replication methods inter-proxy communication, proxy to network-element communication, proxy / replica discovery John Martin chaired the group. John introduced the group and pointed out that this is the last meeting of the working group in its current form. WREC is proceeding, taxonomy a few months late, rechartering discussion (NECP draft is out) as the work we set out to do is done. More than half the participants had read the drafts! Taxonomy [2]draft-ietf-wrec-taxonomy-00.txt is documenting current taxonomy for web replication and caching. Unless there are fundemental problems with the draft, it should be published closed to its current form. NECP draft-cerpa-wrec-necp-00.txt is implemented and should be added. Discussion on the term reverse proxy, consensus that the current wording covers current use. Two weeks is the cutoff for comments to the mailing list, otherwise the document goes to Last Call. Known Problems draft No comments recieved the last weeks, and John Dilley considers the work to be done (John Dilley was unable to attend the meeting and Jay Kistler presented this part. Two weeks for comments, then it goes to Last Call. Research Issues draft There really is not a document. The input so far has been research projects, not issues and what to do with it. Want to postphone the document until the taxonomy is done and discuss what the issues might be then. Decide to drop this document for now. Emerging protocols Network Element Control Protocol (NECP) draft is out as individual Internet-Draft, presented by Jeremy Elson. L4 switches may use this protocol for load balancing or intercepting for transparent proxies. NECP allows the cache and switch to exchange control traffic What control traffic? When server come up, they can tell the switch: "add me to your group for Service X" Servers can send load information; switch does better balancing Switches immediately stop sending work to dead servers using periodic KEEPALIVES Transparent Proxy Caches can tell switches to allow direct connections for certain clients (e.g. on auth failure) Key features minimal assumed per-flow state available on switch extensible load metrics authentication Non-features specific load balancing policies IP addresses of friendly servers/caches configuration management The group suggested and the NECP authors agreed to cleaning up the terminology to be in compliance with the taxonomy draft. This included referencing taxonomy terms and replacing text with standardized terms. WPAD is a working group Internet-Draft draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01.txt (documenting current protocol) presented by Josh Cohen. The DNS part of this is not good enough, but this is currently deployed. Comment on the security consideration section being weak, it should include PAC non-compliance (PAC files intepreted by client in inconsistent ways) and DNS searching if not hit in first zone. Want to move forward with WPAD, issues raised from the AD (Keith) about IAB/IESG and security considerations. Rechartering Suggested starting point: 1. Definition of problem 2. Requirements of a (web) replication architecture replication methods, service vs. content replication loosely coupled vs. tightly coupled content discovery 3. Specific related technology development (e.g.) replica/proxy to network-element communication inter-proxy/replica communication (content distribution) proxy/replica discovery Agreement was reached to use a top-down architecture. Time expected on this is 3-4 months. At the same time there will be specific related technology development that needs to integrated with the solutions. There was a discussion on rechartering, but no conclusion was reached. The discussion is to continue on the mailing list. Joe Touch promised to send outline of architectural requirements to the list.