I’m pleased to report that IETF 71, held in Philadelphia in March 2008 was an enormously successful meeting. We had 1,131 people from 49 different countries in attendance. Comcast was the host and certainly made everyone feel welcome. Comcast provided an impressive 80-gigabit-per-second primary fiber link to the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott, where the meeting was held (if the router line cards had been available, the link could have been upgraded to 100 gigabits per second). Unfortunately, the IETF was unable to generate enough traffic to consume half of the available bandwidth despite a challenge to do so. The site network was subcontracted to VeriLAN Networks. And, as in the past, the success of the meeting depended on a number of dedicated volunteers. Thank you all.
Russ Housley, IETF Chair
The week was filled with the usual mixture of working group (WG) meetings, BoF (birds-of-a-feather) sessions, research group (RG) meetings, and as always, many side meetings.
Since IETF 70, five new WGs were chartered and two WGs were closed. There are now approximately 120 WGs. Between the meetings, the WGs and their individual contributors produced 337 new Internet-Drafts and generated 881 updated Internet-Drafts. The Internet Engineering Steering Group approved 50 Internet-Drafts for publication as RFCs. The RFC Editor published 73 new RFCs.
This was the first meeting supported by the new IETF secretariat vendor: Association Management Solutions (AMS). By all accounts, AMS did an out-standing job. Thanks for all of the hard work and quick study.
Descriptions and agendas for all BoF meetingsApplications Area
esds: Extensible Supply-chain Discovery Service
idn: International Domain Names
General Area
Pufi: Procedures Update for IETF
Operations and Management Area
Canmod: Comparing Approaches to NETCONF Modeling
Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area
Rucus: Reducing Unwanted Communications using SIP
Peppermint: Provisioning Extensions in Peering Registries for Multimedia INTerconnection
Security Area
Kmart: Key Management for Routing Protocols
One of the hot topics during the several sessions and many hallway discussions at IETF 71 was IPv6 adoption (the discussion in the V6OPS WG meeting about requirements for NAT-PT was especially lively). Throughout the week, an IPv6-only network was available to enable attendees to experience the Internet without IPv4. At the Wednesday evening plenary, the IPv4 wireless network was turned off. As part of the experiment, two hours before the plenary, ipv6.google.com became available. A lot of hard work went into making this site and others available in time. The general consensus was that there was much to be learned from the experiment. An IPv6-only wireless network will be available at future meetings.
I look forward to IETF 72 in Dublin (27 July-1 August) and IETF 73 in Minneapolis (16-21 November 2008). Here is Scheduling information for the next IETF meetings. I look forward to seeing you there.