1.1 The Director's Message
The 52nd meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force took place in Salt Lake City, Utah from December 10-14, 2001. As anticipated, due to recent events and the economy, attendance at this meeting was down from "normal" levels. But while attendance was just under 1700, the meeting was quite productive as will be seen upon reviewing the meeting minutes throughout these proceedings.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Novell for hosting the 52nd meeting of the IETF, providing the terminal room facilities and the network infrastructure (along with all sorts of goodies, especially those laptop bags :-)
Individual thanks go to Rhet Thalman and Connie Straw for leading the effort, aided by a good group of people including Winston Bumpus, Steve Kelshaw, Dennis Hartford, Ben Lambert, Kari Mason, and Sharon Stokes. A special thanks to Karen Zunkowski, who kept sending "don't worry, we're still here" messages to calm me down.
The configuration of the terminal room facilities depends a great deal on the generosity of equipment vendors and service providers, and I want to thank the following organizations for their contributions and assistance:
AT&T
Enterasys Networks
Juniper Networks
Nortel Networks
Qwest
Unlimited Technologies
A very special thanks goes to Randy Bush who performed an extraordinary job as the networking guru, coordinating the efforts of the various organizations that joined Novell in providing the terminal room and internal network. Initially, Randy's role was to review the infrastructure details, but as it turned out, a deeper involvement was crucial to the technical success of this meeting.
Randy, on behalf of all of us, especially me, Thank you!
The Multicast Team
I would like to bring your attention a special group of dedicated people who spend a great deal of time and effort, both before and during, each and every IETF meeting. There have been a lot of changes since 1995 when Evi Nemeth and her hungry grad students first took on the multicast support role at the IETF meetings, both in terms of technology, software and hardware, and such people as:
Joel Jaeggli and Hans Kuhn (University of Oregon), the "multicast guys" who drag the "refrigerator" - a cabinet of multicast and networking gear - all over the world, providing multicast capabilities to the IETF and many other meetings. Network configuration and the multicast infrastructure are skillfully provided by Greg Shephard (Juniper Networks), Dave Meyer (Sprint), and John Meylor (Cisco). These are the ones who are called when something isn't quite right.
Pulling it all together is unswerving Kevin Almeroth (University of California, Santa Barbara) who provides technical oversight, coordination, and knows how to use some one else's credit card! Kevin also assembles the team of volunteers (aka hungry grad students) who operate the cameras and consume massive amounts of pizza!
A note of thanks also goes to Lucy Lynch, also from the University of Oregon, for letting us have Joel and Hans.
And a very special thanks goes out to the Internet Society who funds the travel costs of the multicast team.
What's Hot and coming up?
Attendees at IETF meetings are often given a first look (or hint) at what the future holds by sitting in on BOF meetings. BOFs are informal get-togethers, primarily to ascertain interest in new ideas or proposals. Many are precursors to new working groups, while others are forums for sharing ideas and concerns. One BOF for which all those apply was the Internet Emergency Preparedness BOF. Sounds interesting and scary at the same time, doesn't it? Not sure what this topic is all about? Review the meeting minutes and the slide presentation.
Another charged set of attendees converged at the Internet Resource Name Search Service BOF. Two BOFs that may now be close to achieving Working Group status are Content Distribution Internetworking BOF and the Open Pluggable Edge Services BOF.
All were well attended, and included multiple presentations. Want a peek as to what's on the technical horizon? Read the minutes and view the presentation slides of these BOFs.
Upcoming Meetings
The IETF will next meet in Minneapolis, Minnesota from March 17-22, 2002. Cable and Wireless has graciously offered to host this meeting.
Don't forget: the next meeting of 2002 will be in Yokohama, Japan. Future meetings are in the planning stages. For information about future meetings, visit the IETF Web Page. Our URL is
http://www.ietf.org
Steve <scoya@ietf.org>