On 18-nov-03, at 23:44, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
Maybe this would be a good time to explain what the IETF needs a 9.33
person secretariat for, and why the secretariat must be entirely
funded
by meeting fees.
The Secretariat handles I-D processing, meeting planning, IESG
telechats, software development and systems administration to support
all
that, and much, much more.
I have no first-hand information on how much time this costs, but 9.33
people for all of this seems like a lot. I-Ds could be automated, and I
gather the actual work in getting meetings off the ground is handled by
an outside bureau anyway.
As for the network: Vienna has shown that it's possible to do better.
There were at least two major external items that were different this
time: nasty, aggressive worms, both inside and outside
Ok, so we should make sure that incoming access to the network has
wormfilters and the access points must support blocking certain mac
addresses from connecting to the network. Wouldn't it make sense to
require people to register their mac address, by the way? This should
make tracking down misbehaving hosts much easier.
and "helpful" operating systems that
think that going into IBSS mode when they don't hear a base station is
"user-friendly".
I think part of the blame should go to the access points that kept
disappearing. Someone told me this was because the AP transmitters were
set to just 1 mw. If this is true, it was obviously a very big mistake.
As long as we're bitching about the network: would it be possible to
start doing some unicast streaming of sessions in the future? Access to
multicast hasn't gotten significantly better the past decade, but
streaming over unicast is now routine as the codecs are so much better
these days, as is typical access bandwidth. I'll happily take 40 kbps
MPEG-4 audio only; the video is so badly out of sync that it is
unwatchable most of the time anyway.