Westnet and Utah outage

Thu Nov 23 16:59:29 UTC 1995

>  The IETF is essentially a protocol standardization group, not
> an operations group.

As one of the ADs in the Operational Requirements area of the IETF I'll
second what Hans-Werner said.

The Operational Requirements area is designed mostly to be able to
provide feedback to protocol developers about what happened when
a new protocol was tried out in the real world.  It also can
house efforts to establish measurement methodologies and has
been used as a meeting place and self help group for people who are
deploying some technology.

There is a new effort in the IETF working on figuring out what to
measure to gage the QoS of a network (the IPPM effort in the Benchmarking
Methodology Working Group) but Mike O'Dell (the other AD) and I made
it very clear that the working group could talk about termonology, 
methodology & even tools but could not start saying what a "good"
or a "bad" service would be.

Bestowing good housekeeping awards on Internet providers can not
be the task of an organization that has the level of participation that
the IETF does from the Internet providers.  There are a number of legal
issues here.

If someone would like to start up an Internet users group, I'd
sure be interested in watching the mailing list discussions but
the IETF would not be a good home for such a group.

Scott