Subject: Re: Mod: TOS bit semantics

From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 18:01:44 -0500 (EST)

Juha asks:
> does anyone know what our mandate is? 

Tony replies:

> I could have sworn that this was the
> IETF and that we were trying to fix a problem

the AD sez:
the mandate (if needed) is to "fix a problem" 
the problem descrition seems a bit fuzzy at the moment though

Scott (playing the AD)

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From: Tony Li <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Nov 1997 18:11:42 -0800

> the problem descrition seems a bit fuzzy at the moment though

Fair enough.

The problem, as I see it, is that we would like to provide differentiated
services over the Internet.  The whole Internet.  We would like to do this
in a practical, scalable, well-defined, interoperable way.

I think that most people on this list now realize that low-granularity
stateful approaches do not meet the practicality and scalability
requirements.

Thus, we are now trying to define a pragmatic method of differentiating
traffic as well as an implementable description of the service
differentiation.  I suspect that many people also have some intrinsic
architecture in mind for how this propagates to the edge of the network in
a sane fashion.  This needs to get written down and discussed.

Tony

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From: Juha Heinanen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 11:07:00 +0200

> IETF and that we were trying to fix a problem

i just asked about the mandate because fred baker who i believe is one
of the ietf high-ups listed in an email a long list of rfcs that already
tell what those bits are.  but it is fine if we don't need to care of
them.  

also, as tony said, if vendors have not implemented the stuff, isn't
there ietf procedures that lower the status of those rfcs from standards
track to experimental or something like that?  and if so, why hasn't the
ietf high-ups done so?  it is very confusing to a non-full time ietf guy
like me to know which rfcs are those that one shouldn't care about and
which ones are junk even if they are still called 'standards track' like
rfc1349 is.

-- juha