CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
Reported by Cyndi Mills/BBN
ACCT Minutes
o Status Review
- Internet Accounting Background Document
- Internet Accounting Architecture Document
* Reporting Format
* Rule Table
* Meter Control
- Liason with other Activities
* SMDS
* RLANMON MIB/OPSTATS
* Interop BOF
* SNMP/Security
o Working Agenda
- Consensus on Internet Accounting Background Document
- Consensus on Internet Accounting Architecture (Reporting
Format)
* Work on Rule Table
- SNMP Concerns
* Discuss Sample MIB
* Find a home for the MIB
* Security Concerns
Internet Accounting Background Document
The Working Group agreed to recommend the advance of the document to
informational RFC when the following corrections are made:
The language about security requirements needs to be made more precise.
The security area will provide a review of the amended text. Mention
that the collection protocol is responsible for providing the necessary
security, and therefore details of the security mechanisms are outside
the scope of the document.
An explanation of the trade-offs between accounting on entry and exit
(or both) in a router should be included. This discussion should
include examples of performance impact, billing for offered load vs.
billing for delivered load, reconciliation of counts with neighbors, and
fragmentation. Note that SMDS has chosen to count on exit only.
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Internet Accounting Architecture
The Accounting Architecture Document will be edited and then placed in
the Internet-Draft area for access before the next meeting. The
Architecture Document currently covers much of the material which was
originally intended for the Meter Services Document. Mark Seger
contributed many of the ideas and deserves special mention.
In the reporting format, the current link-level address is an
insufficient description. It is amended to be the ``adjacent address'',
as in the address of the next lower protocol layer carrying the internet
packet. This concept should be explained in the architecture. OSPF
describes a similar adjacency and may provide a useful explanation.
The motivation for the polling vs. interval reporting discussion in the
architecture document should be made clearer.
The rule table was reviewed and will be re-issued in another format. It
was agreed that some form of rule pre-processor will probably be needed
for network manager sanity.
The manner in which the rule table for internet accounting forms a tree
structure should be related to routing trees.
The notation for the rule table should be amended. The binary pattern
matching scheme should be made up of the character set ``0 1 *'', where
``0'' requires that the corresponding bit in the value to be searched be
0 for a match to occur, ``1'' that the bit be 1, and ``*'' where then
corresponding bit may be either 1 or 0. The overall notation should be
restructured to make the formation of a MIB easier.
Because of the limitations of SNMP, it is difficult to access accounting
information in table format. The appropriate set of protocol
contortions needs to be investigated to return accounting information
accurately and efficiently.
The maximum lifetime of a flow should be determined by the managing
entity rather than by the meter. The manager must be able to maintain a
clean state - e.g., insure that a record is fetched and a new record is
started for the same flow as an atomic operation. Also, the fetched
record should be stored at least temporarily (for a ``short'' time,
``short'' to be determined by the manager) in order to allow for a
retransmission (i.e., repeated request).
The mechanisms for controlling data loss should be simplified to one or
two parameters. If a meter is in danger of buffer overflow, probably
the buffers will overflow and data will be dropped before the manager
can take action anyway. This need further consideration.
The flags grouping data need further definition. The notion that some
group of flows may be categorized as ``expendable'' (discard these flows
first) or ``essential'' (avoid discarding these flows if at all
possible) should be further explained.
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SNMP Concerns
Jesse Walker wrote a sample MIB illustrating techniques that will be
needed for expressing the accounting reporting format in terms that are
compatible with SNMP.
The possibility of including of the MIB as a subtree of the RLANMON MIB
was discussed and rejected by the Working Group. The two chief reasons
for this were:
1. The RLANMON MIB is currently progressing towards draft standard and
the late addition of accounting might hinder their progress.
2. Devices other that remote LAN monitoring equipment also perform
accounting functions, so it is inappropriate to demand that these
other devices implement the remote LAN monitoring MIB. It was
pointed out that the RLANMON MIB could be structured so that only
the accounting option is present in the MIB, but this was not
considered a sufficient reason for homing the accounting MIB to
RLANMON.
Internet Accounting requires that SNMP be able to dump tables in a more
efficient and atomic fashion. FTP might be a preferred method of
reporting data, but not all meters can be expected to support FTP due to
memory limitations and abbreviated protocol stacks.
There are concerns that SNMP security may not be sufficient for
accounting purposes.
Note change in location of list.
To join the accounting Working Group list, please send mail to
accounting-wg-request@wugate.wustl.edu with ``SUBSCRIBE'' in the subject
line. To leave the accounting Working Group mailing list, send mail to
the same address with the subject line ``UNSUBSCRIBE''.
Attendees
Gigi Chu gigic@hpspd.spd.hp.com
Tracy Cox tacox@sabre.bellcore.com
James Davin jrd@ptt.lcs.mit.edu
Alan Emtage bajan@cc.mcgill.ca
Shawn Gallagher gallagher@quiver.enet.dec.com
Phillip Gross pgross@nis.ans.net
Ittai Hershman ittai@nis.ans.net
Mark Hoerth mark_hoerth@hp0400.desk.hp.com
Mike Janson mjanson@mot.com
Deidre Kostick dck2@sabre.bellcore.com
Tim Lee-Thorp ngc!tim@uunet.uu.net
Peter Liebscher plieb@sura.net
Joshua Littlefield josh@cayman.com
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Cyndi Mills cmills@bbn.com
Dennis Morris morrisd@imo-uvax.dca.mil
Bradford Parker brad@cayman.com
Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil
Ron Roberts roberts@jessica.stanford.edu
Kary Robertson kr@concord.com.kr
Gregory Ruth gruth@bbn.com
John Scudder jgs@merit.edu
Robert Shirey shirey@mitre.org
Anil Singhal
Roxanne Streeter streeter@nsipo.nasa.gov
Ronald Tencati tencati@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov
Claudio Topolcic topolcic@nri.reston.va.us
William Versteeg bvs@nrc.com
Jesse Walker walker@eider.enet@decpa.dec.com
Gerard White ger@concord.com
Osmund de Souza desouza@osdpc.ho.att.com
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