Subject: Summary of NFSv4 WG Meetings @ IETF 47, Adelaide

From: Brent Callaghan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 17:49:02 -0800

Summary of NFSv4 WG Meetings @ IETF 47, Adelaide
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The NFSv4 working group met in two sessions. The first
on Monday evening for 2 1/2 hours and the second on
Tuesday night for 1 hour.  The meetings were attended
by 20 people. The document editor, Spencer Shepler began
with a summary of the changes incorporated in draft 06 of
the protocol description (submitted to the IESG for
Proposed status). He then presented a proposal for a
new informational RFC that describes protocol implementation
choices and targeted at protocol developers.  While the
protocol specification attempts to be implementation-neutral,
the implementation RFC would be advisory in nature and
provide useful implementation hints, e.g. how to handle
mounts on the client, or alternatives if the server
cannot support certain file attributes.

Brent Callaghan gave a short report on the protocol testing
at the recent Connectathon event, followed by Bev Crair of
Sun who presented a list of the binary and source code offerings
that Sun makes available for NFSv4. In particular, the TI-RPC
source code, including RPCSEC_GSS security, is now available
under the SISSL license.

For the rest of the meeting, Brian Pawlowski lead an open
discussion, begining with a question on hardware decoding
of NFS requests.  Constantine Sapuntzakis suggested the
protocol should include features to facilitate location of
large data blocks within the requests or responses.  The
consensus was to leave it alone for now. Neil Brown raised
a question about LIPKEY authentication for server callbacks.
Mike Eisler suggested that the server might provide a public
key for the client to use. There was some discussion of 
whether the changeid attribute should be a random or
incrementing value. Spencer will make this more clear in the spec.

The Tuesday night session contained more open discussion.
Neil Brown expressed enthusiasm for the use of LIPKEY in
a campus environment.  Brian lead a discussion on future
work for the this WG (or a successor WG) and enumerated
some work items before closing the meeting.

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More complete meeting minutes will follow - including a
pointer to the presentations.
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