CURRENT MEETING REPORT

Reported by Robert Moskowitz, Chrysler Corporation

Minutes of the Guidelines for UDP and TCP Based Systems BOF (guts)

A brief period of agenda bashing started off the meeting. The agenda laid out discussions in two areas -- impact of protocols on large networks, and impact of applications on the network. Following this the chair was asked to present some examples fo the types of problems being seen. This led to a lively discussion that consumed the remainder of the working group.

Thoughts and threads discussed:

• RFC1122 (host requirements) was a good thing, because it coalesced a lot of information in different documents together and explained the reasoning behind a number of rules. It is, however, several years out of date, and there is much new "lore" which could be encoded.
  
• Many of the "problems" seen in the network were both under active pursuit in other working groups (such as HTTP improvements, and IntSrv type work) or are open research questions without clearcut answers.
  
• Application developers need more information than they currently have. Most do not read RFCs, but rather standard references such as Stevens. There should be a trickle down of information from the IETF through such channels so that better information about programming for the network gets to the programmers.
  
• Many agreed that it was important to clear up common misunderstandings. An example of things discussed were "just because it runs fine on my LAN doesn't make it a good in the Internet".
  

The focus of this group, should it form, should be on teaching applications programmers not to make common mistakes. Also, whatever documents are produced should be careful not to explain to programmers how to get that extra oomph out of the network by being bad to it!

Richard Stevens agreed to set up a mailing list for GUTS and draft something to continue discussions. Once the list is set up, we will announce it on the IETF list. It is unclear at this time if a wg or even an informational RFC will result from this effort, but many agreed it was worth further investigations.