Subject: Protocol Action: Service Location Protocol, Version 2 to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 07:39:25 -0400

The IESG has approved publication of the following Internet-Drafts as
Proposed Standards:

  o Service Location Protocol, Version 2
	<draft-ietf-svrloc-protocol-v2-15.txt>

  o Service Templates and service: Schemes 
	<draft-ietf-svrloc-service-scheme-14.txt>

These documents are the product of the Service Location Protocol Working Group.
The IESG contact persons are Erik Nordmark and Thomas Narten

Technical Summary
 
The document "Service Location Protocol, Version 2" provides a
framework for providing hosts with access to information about the
existence, location, and configuration of networked services.
Traditionally, users have had to find services by knowing the name of
a network host (a human readable text string) which is an alias for a
network address.  SLP eliminates the need for a user to know the name
of a network host supporting a service.  Rather, the user supplies the
desired type of service and a set of attributes which describe the
service.  Based on that description, the Service Location Protocol
resolves the network address of the service for the user. SLPv2 is
suitable for use within a site (which can range from a few to several
thousand nodes), but does not scale to the size of the entire
Internet.

The document "Service Templates and service: Schemes" describes a
formal procedure for defining and standardizing new service types and
attributes for use with the "service:" scheme. The "service:" schema
are used to describe services in SLPv2. The formal descriptions of
service types and attributes are templates that are human and machine
understandable.

"An API for Service Location" describes an API (using C or Java) for
accessing and using the facilities of SLPv2.

Working Group Summary

This document is a revised version of SLPv1 (RFC 2165) and builds on
the experience of SLPv1. There was consensus in the WG for these
documents. One Last Call comment attempted to simplify certain aspects
of the protocol with a goal of making it more easily possible in the
future to use an alternate directory access protocol. Much work was
done to attempt to address the concerns raised. In the end, however,
the WG felt that the necessary changes were too large and removed
important functionality, and the proposed changes were not adopted.

Protocol Quality

These documents have been reviewed for the IESG by Thomas
Narten. There is at least one implementation of SLPv2 and the APIs,
based on recent (but not the final) drafts.