The IETF returned to Europe for the 39th meeting. The IETF met in Munich, Bavaria, Germany from August 11-15,1997. This was the third time the IETF has traveled to Europe for a meeting, but there were some significant differences here.
"The network is everywhere" is a phrase we see used more and more, and our local hosts took that to heart by providing the first link to the terminal room from the hotel's bar area. Matt Thomas helped extend the network even further by distributing Digital's wireless LAN links for a number of laptop computers!
As many IETFers know, there is typically a drop in the number of attendees when we meet in Europe. The Munich meeting followed this trend as the attendance dropped from the previous meeting in Memphis; it dropped by 30 ATTENDEES (that's an actual number, not a percentage!). There were twice as many attendees at the Munich meeting as in Stockholm (July 1995). The split between non-US and US attendees was about even, which is typical for non-North American meetings.
The Munich presentations had quite an international flavour:
Dr. Walter DeBacker provided an interesting view and insight on the interests and activities of the European Union to the Internet, the text of which is included in these proceedings.
Michael Behringer (DANTE) made a presentation on the Trans-European IP Backbone network. In addition to describing the components and configurations, Michael also shared operational experiences and statistical information, as well as a view to the future plans for the successor.
Harald Alvestrand, Co-Director of the Applications Area, spoke to the plenary audience about A Character Set Policy for the IETF. In his presentation, Harald summarized the need for such a policy and the requirements for flexibility and language tagging, as well as providing details on ISO 10646 and UTF-8 character sets.
The final presenter was Peter Danzig who provided a perspective on Web Caching. Peter provided statistical information on proxy caching, transitioning to the topics of scalability, Inter-cache protocol based sharing, and hash-based clusters.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the German Chapter of the Internet Society for hosting this meeting, for providing the terminal room facilities, and arranging the social event. I would especially like to recognize the efforts of Dave Morton of ECRC and Hubert Martens of Multinet who organized and managed every aspect of the terminal room and social event, including assembling sponsors and an impressive number of volunteers (although I'm not sure if Hubert's children considered it "volunteering" :-)
Of course, there are the terminal room regulars... no IETF terminal room looks complete without Jim Martin or Marten Terpstra sitting in the network area, helping everyone with everything! The configuration of the terminal room facilities depend a great deal on the generosity of equipment vendors and service providers, and I want to thank the following organizations for their contributions and assistance:
Financial Equipment and Services
Siemens Bay Networks
Cisco Systems Digital
Bay Networks ECRC
Lotus Mnet
Microsoft Microsoft
Spacenet Multinet
Quante
Siemens
Siemens Nixdorf
Upcoming Meetings
The final IETF meeting of 1997, hosted by Newbridge, is in Washington, DC the week of December 7-11, 1997. The IETF returns to Los Angeles from March 31-April 4, 1998. Motorola will be our host for the summer meeting in Chicago, Illinois during the month of August. Microsoft will host the final 1998 meeting. This meeting is in the initial planning stages. For information about future meetings, visit the IETF Web Page at http://www.ietf.org
Steve <scoya@ietf.org>