Welcome to the Autumn 2006 edition of the IETF Journal. In this issue we’re pleased to present highlights from last July’s IETF meeting in Montreal. While it is not intended as a full report, we believe it provides a fairly comprehensive overview of developments and outcomes from the meeting.
Several important discussions that took place were related to processes, such as the request-for-proposal (RFP) for the RFC Editor function and independent submissions to the RFC Editor. Also discussed were possible changes to the IETF Standards Track. See summaries of those discussions in the plenary report that appears on page 4.
Other updates from the IETF meeting cover the areas of Routing, the Domain Name System (DNS), and Mobility. Note also the special reports from the Internet Research Task Force and the IETF Tools Team.
We are especially pleased to announce a new Internet Society fellowship program that is intended to increase participation at IETF meetings by people from developing countries. The program was launched at IETF 66 with the inclusion of two engineers from Africa, both of whom attended the meeting for the first time. A report on their impressions appears on page 18. Many thanks to the mentors who volunteered to guide the fellows through their first meeting. ISOC plans to continue the fellowship program through the next IETF meeting. We hope to see more participation by engineers from developing regions – both on the mailing lists and at the meetings.
Those of you who are relatively new to IETF meetings might be interested to read about the history of DNS security and the development of DNSSEC, which appears on page 25.
Those who have a longer history of attending IETF might remember the GSE (or 8+8, as it was originally called), a proposal to address the scalability of multihoming for the routing system. This proposal is now being revisited. See the article on this topic on page 29.
Finally, ISOC would like to take this opportunity to recognise the 25th anniversary of the development of the TCP/IP protocol. We offer a special tribute to this breakthrough in communications technology on page 23.
Have fun reading. We welcome your comments and invite contributions to future issues of the IETF Journal.