Tony Finch – blog

After the IETF 101 hackathon (day 1, day 2) we got into the usual IETF rhythm of working group meetings on Monday.

Morning

The first part of the day I mostly spent working through my email backlog and various things that did not get done during the UCU USS strike.

I was sitting near the BIND9 team who were discussing how their workflow is changing with the move to GitLab.

intarea

The first WG meeting I attended was the Internet Area working group. The IETF is divided into areas (e.g. Internet, Transport, Security, Applications) which are further subdivided into specific protocol-related working groups. The area working groups discuss topics that cross over multiple working groups or do not fit into an existing working group.

The most relevant item on the agenda was a document titled “IP fragmentation considered fragile”. This is a particular pain point for the DNS, especially with large EDNS buffer sizes and large DNSSEC records, and the draft says that DNS needs work.

Although DNS people are aware of this problem, I don’t know of any work in the IETF dnsop WG related to avoiding fragmentation. Maybe I should start a draft…

dhc

The next WG meeting I attended was for DHCP. One of the ongoing topics here is a YANG model for managing DHCP servers with netconf.

Over coffee before the dhc meeting I had a chat with Normen Kowalewski from Deutsch Telekom about his DHCP deployment using ISC Kea with a distributed Cassandra database for lease storage - super cool. He’s also very keen on YANG and netconf, and convinced me that I should learn more about it.

I made a small suggestion on this topic, that the DHCP YANG model could maybe use JDBC URLs for configuring lease storage.

mfld

IETF attendees joke that the meeting should be called MFLD, short for “many fine lunches and dinners”. Yesterday the friendly folks at isc.org kindly invited me to join them for both lunch and dinner. It’s nice getting to know people in person, having worked with them over email on open source software.