Subject: Protocol Action: Multicast-Scope Zone Announcement Protocol (MZAP) to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 15:15:33 -0500

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Multicast-Scope Zone
Announcement Protocol (MZAP)' <draft-ietf-mboned-mzap-06.txt> as a
Proposed Standard.  This document is the product of the MBONE
Deployment Working Group.  The IESG contact persons are Bert Wijnen and
Randy Bush.

Technical Summary

    Two problems make administrative multicast scoping difficult to
    deploy and difficult to use:

    o  Misconfiguration is easy.  It is difficult to detect scope zones that
       have been configured so as to not be convex (the shortest path
       between two nodes within the zone passes outside the zone), or to
       leak (one or more border routers were not configured correctly),
       or to intersect in both area and address range.
    o  Applications have no way to discover the scope zones that are
       relevant to them.  This makes it difficult to use administrative
       scope zones, and hence reduces the incentive to deploy them.

    The document defines the Multicast-Scope Zone Announcement Protocol
    (MZAP) for discovering the multicast administrative scope zones that
    are relevant at a particular location.  MZAP also provides
    mechanisms whereby two common misconfigurations of administrative
    scope zones can be discovered.

Working Group Summary

    There was no technical or procedural dissent in the working group.
    In fact, the lack of comment was notable.

Protocol Quality

    This document was reviewed for the IESG by Randy Bush.  There is at
    least one implementation of SLPv2 and the APIs, based on recent (but
    not the final) drafts.   A student at UCLA has implemented the
    internet-draft on FreeBSD 2.2.6-based, and has started preliminary
    testing on CAIRN nodes.