These are the minutes from the Web Replication and Caching (wrec) working group meeting at the 45th IETF meeting in Oslo, Norway on 12 July 1999. These minutes are available on the web at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/John_Dilley/ietf-45-wrec-minutes.html.
Ingrid presented the current status of the Web Replication and Caching Taxonomy working draft, draft-ietf-wrec-taxonomy-01.txt, and asked the attendees for input on a number of remaining open issues. This section captures highlights from the presentation, summarizing the slide presentation.
Points here: assume you have read the draft. The main issues are security, terminology, and "transparent". The team is aiming for a final version "real soon now".
Non-issues related to security include system security and HTTP; the draft is not doing anything about these, take them as they are. The underlying security issues are taken as a baseline for web cache security.
The main security issues for web caching were discussed. At present these are
How should terminology be described in the document?
Suggestion: always preface the term transparent with an adjective, such as "semantic", "network", "user", "automatic configuration". Define these terms. Transparency is dependent upon the layer you are working at. HTTP/1.1 working group has also fought with this.
Need to distinguish between browser configuration and network transparency. Avoid use of transparency for browser configuration -- call that automatic browser configuration.
Next draft to be available by 1st September 1999 for presentation to the wrec@cs.utk.edu mailing list. Goal: get closure via the mailing list before the Washington IETF meeting.
The Inter-Cache effort is working out protocol modifications in ICP and HTCP to improve how caches communicate. Three changes have been agreed to in the last six months, and are in the process of being implemented. The next document revision will correct some remaining minor problems and will be submitted as an Internet Draft. The three changes are:
Add product-name and product-version, add tracecode and trace-time. See the working draft for details.
Comment: you might want to carry this information for events other than a hit or a miss, for example access denied or for caches to exchange product name and version information.
Question: what is trace time? Trace time is the time the object was last verified by the proxy. Need for multiple trace times since each proxy in the chain can validate at a different time; trace time is different from last-modified time.
Two purge operations are proposed for ICP and HTTP:
Should have an implementation note so proxies will err on the side of conservatism and : keep these PURGE methods from going too far.
Question: the threat model is obvious. What is the security model?
New ICP flag; if present in a request, response must include the flag and should not send the URL in payload. Standard RFC2168 response if flag is not present in a request - products should be careful to follow the spec.
Recommend to make this an informational RFC.
Point from the floor: documents must be standards track to add a new method to HTTP/1.1 standard. Is this planned?
Document Purpose: Document the state of content caching protocols and products on the web today.
Known Problems - Summary of current submissions made; see the draft for details.
Next Steps
Brian Carpenter: Status of WPAD: is it really a solution to a known problem? Is it a proprietary technology? May not be relevant to this document. Company submittals are OK but are different from (IETF) standard solutions.
Joe Touch: Difference between performance issues and known problems. Know problems break the spec, cause catastrophic problems for conformant products. "Not as good as we want it to be" is another issue. Do we want to capture those in this document? General feeling was yes, we did, although the serious problems should be separated from the performance issues.
Version 2 of WCCP v1 has been submitted for publication. It was not presented at the meeting. A new version of the WPAD draft has also been submitted. It is implemented in ie5. It was not presented either.
Publishing RFCs as Informational or Standard - Informational is acceptable for proprietary protocols and are useful so specifications are freely available from ietf.org. Standards track RFCs require multiple independent implementations and open, community-influenced specifications.
John Dilley briefly introduced a potential alternative for inter-cache communication based upon a distributed object consistency protocol. An introductory white paper will be posted to the wrec mailing list for discussion and input.
Rechartering: John Martin mentioned the desire to re-charter the group to be able to address broader topics, but noted that we need further progress on current work before rechartering the working group.
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