CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Kent England/BBN Minutes of the Network Joint Management Working Group (NJM) Canonical Trouble Mailbox What if we all defined a mailbox named ``trouble@your.net'' for receipt of network trouble reports? What if we all defined a finger-name ``noc@your.net'' so users could receive a small bit of information about our respective NOCs? There was some general discussion of DNS records needed for this. Many nets don't have a machine called ``your.net'', but use MX records. Some don't use MX records for ``your.net'', but instead use a machine named ``noc.your.net'' or similar. Finger requires an address record, but an alias record could provide some indirection for ``your.net'' Vikas Aggrawal, JvNCnet, noted that he had posted a note on the namedroppers list discussing this. [Vikas, repost to njm?] So what names should we use? Joe Ragland, CONCERT, doesn't like ``noc'' and Carol Ward from WestNet doesn't like ``trouble''. Gene suggested the name ``net-trouble@noc.your.net'' for the canonical mailbox, but this is too long for finger, so use ``noc@noc.your.net'' for finger. Dan Long, NEARnet, will add a field to his NOC PhoneBook entry for nets to include the preferred mailbox name. Then Gene raised the issue of DNS inverse address-to-name lookups (PTR records). Gene suggested that all router interfaces should inverse lookup to a descriptive name, and, in addition, the host zero address should invert to something descriptive [of what?]. Vince Fuller noted that DNS already maps host zero to the gateway name. This is left as an unresolved issue. John Curran, NEARnet, noted upcoming Responsible Person DNS records that we will find useful. Gene Hastings reminded us all to fill out information for Dan Long's NOC PhoneBook entries. Dan said he would send a note to njm with changes to the entry information. Gene raised the issue of ``nsr'' mailing list usage, and suggested a new Merit list for discussion of internet woes called ``internet- ops@merit.edu''. Ittai Hershman, ANS, said there had been some discussion in Merit/ANS about moving discussions from nsr to nwg or Gene's suggested new list. The concern is about too large a group of readers engaging in too much traffic of discussion and diluting the quality of the nsr list for operational people. John Curran noted that individuals will use whatever list they can find to report trouble and we need to educate users as these misdirections are corrected. Ittai noted that this had been discussed this morning in UCP in the context of 1 machine parseable messages, but these lists don't scale well. Dale Johnson, Merit, noted that this issue parallels the issue of usage of ietf list and that we need to create ``nsr-discuss'' as has been suggested for ietf. Joe Ragland said that one reason we need this list is to relieve Merit of unrelated traffic. FARNET members need an independent channel for communication. Cathy Witbrodt [sp?], ESnet, asked if users aren't going to use this list and Ittai said UCP has addressed this concern. Dan Long noted that service providers need a discussion list for themselves. We agreed to use the existing nwg mailing list as an ``nsr-discuss'' list and to use njm as a meta problem discussion list. [So nsr remains the channel for Merit to send out announcements, nwg is for discussion of operational problems, and njm is for meta discussions about ops. -kwe] Tricks of the Trade Vince Fuller, BARRNET, noted that he is tired of reports to BARRNET from users that say that BARRNET is broken, when in actuality these users are simply unable to traceroute across the MILNET. How can users be made more aware of the limitations of traceroute? Jordan Becker asked if every AS has a reliable host for pinging and tracing? Dan Long noted he will include such an entry in his NOC PhoneBook. What about test servers to test telnet, mail, etc? Dan Long noted the success of the NEARnet mail bouncer [bouncer@nic.near.net] as a very useful tool for site contacts to use to test mailers. This automatic bouncer has reduced the workload on NEARnet operations and analyst staff tremendously and is seen as a very valuable service [almost free]. How do we associate network numbers to the AS announcing them? Jessica Yu of Merit noted that they have this file at Merit [net.now?] Ittai noted that new tools for getting and updating this information are under development [ANS?] and we should be hearing more about this in the near future. Cathy, ESnet, noted that she builds router access control lists from this file and Merit should announce changes to this file format in advance to avoid Cathy having problems like the day she lost NEARnet when it went over to the T3 backbone and the file format changed. Gene noted that Van Jacobson [everyone genuflect] has a new path characteristics analysis tool that analyzes paths per hop. John Curran noted that the NNSC is doing another issue of the Internet Managers PhoneBook on paper and electronically. Dial-ups and Serial Port Servers Dave OLeary, SURANet, noted that he had sent a note to regional-techs 2 asking for information on dial-up service and hadn't gotten much response. This started a discussion of dial-up servers, or serial port servers. Gene Hastings noted that PSC has a NetBlazer dial-up with SLIP for schools to use. Lines are shared. Dave OLeary asked about the Livingston product and Brian Lloyd and Vince Fuller seemed to know most about this new product. There was some discussion about the difficulty of using a NetBlazer as a router. Seems NetBlazers don't do dynamic routing very well. And then there is the difficulty of tracking hosts amongst serial ports. Milo Medin, NSI ``bureaucrat'', noted that dial-up servers could use OSPF and advertise host routes in order to solve the host tracking problem. The question was asked about who all sells serial port servers and the list looks like: o Cisco TRouter (NEARnet uses) o Xylogics Annex o NetBlazer o Xyplex has something o NAT cheap router (see Vince Fuller for more info) Other Business As we seemed to have used up all our time, the other agenda items were deferred. Attendees Vikas Aggarwal aggarwal@jvnc.net Jordan Becker becker@nis.ans.net John Curran Tom Easterday tom@cic.net Kent England kwe@bbn.com Vince Fuller vaf@stanford.edu Jack Hahn hahn@sura.net Eugene Hastings hastings@psc.edu Ittai Hershman ittai@nis.ans.net Dale Johnson dsj@merit.edu James Jokl jaj@virginia.edu Dan Jordt danj@nwnet.net Mark Knopper mak@merit.edu Walter Lazear lazear@gateway.mitre.org Daniel Long long@nic.near.net Milo Medin medin@nsipo.nasa.gov Donald Morris morris@ucar.edu David O'Leary oleary@sura.net Marsha Perrott mlp+@andrew.cmu.edu Joe Ragland jrr@concert.net 3 Ron Roberts roberts@jessica.stanford.edu Harri Salminen hks@funet.fi Tom Sandoski tom@concert.net Bernhard Stockman boss@sunet.se Roxanne Streeter streeter@nsipo.nasa.gov Claudio Topolcic topolcic@nri.reston.va.us Carol Ward cward@spot.colorado.edu Cathy Wittbrodt cjw@nersc.gov Jessica Yu jyy@merit.edu 4