Subject: [nfsv4] [FedFS] Meeting Minutes, 2/18/2010

From: James Lentini <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:42:41 -0500 (EST)

FedFS Meeting Minutes, 2/18/2010
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Attendees
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Craig Everhart (NetApp)
James Lentini (NetApp)
Chris Stacey (EMC)
Robert Thurlow (Sun)

Minutes
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+ IETF Note Well Agreement

  This is a reminder that our discussions are governed by the 
  IETF Note Well Agreement. See:

    http://www.ietf.org/NOTEWELL.html

  We will start each week's meeting with this announcement.

+ FedFS at Connectathon

  No logistical changes since last week.

  Rob Thurlow suggested that it would be interesting to prototype 
  an implementation of the FedFS ONC RPC Admin protocol. 

  The kickoff meeting for replication, migration, and referrals 
  will be on Monday morning.

+ USENIX FAST'10 BOF

  James Lentini sent out slide deck for review.

  Craig had some good suggestions that James incorporated today.

  As BOF, this will be an informal event. We don't know 
  who will attend. The audience will dictate how much of 
  the presentation we use. If the audience is already familiar with 
  FedFS, then we won't need the slides. 

+ Discuss FEDFS_GET_LIMITED_NSDB_PARAMS procedure 

  We continued discussing if the NSDB container entry should be an 
  NSDB parameter.

  The idea is attractive because it removes an argument to 
  FEDFS_JUNCTION_CREATE and allows implementations to store less 
  data in every junction.
  
  If an NSDB was implemented with an LDAP Directory Service 
  containing multiple DITs, a single NCE would only be able 
  to point to a FedFS subtree in one of these DITs.

  We noted that a single NCE per NSDB would not limit a single 
  server from running multiple LDAP Directory Services each 
  with one DIT. 

  We discussed what capabilities current LDAP implementations 
  have to support these types of configurations. We agreed that 
  the protocols should not be limited by the abilities of any 
  one implementation.

  [Editor's note: Here is the OpenLDAP FAQ entry I mentioned 
   during the call:
   http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/342.html
   The advice is about how to configure a directory with multiple 
   DITs (suffixes), not against using multiple DITs.]

  It was also pointed out that before the NSDB Container Entry, 
  there was no way for an NSDB to contain multiple FedFS subtrees. 
  All entries were under a single well known root suffix 
  (e.g. dc=fed-fs,dc=com, then later "o=fedfs")

  We agreed that the best way forward would be to solicit input 
  from LDAP experts on the utility of configuring an LDAP 
  directory with multiple DITs. Rob Thurlow volunteered to follow 
  up on this.

  We briefly discussed if the LDAP DN of the FedFS tree could be 
  generated by concatenating the NCE with other information such as 
  the NSDB's domain (e.g. NCE + "dc=example,dc=com"). It is 
  possible to configure an LDAP Directory with a root suffix 
  that is not based on a domain name (e.g. "o=foo"), so this 
  would pose some problems.

+ Next Meeting

  There will be no meeting next week.

  We will meet again on March 4. On that date, we hope to reach 
  agreement on the above issue. 

  If we have resolved the above, we will revise the appropriate documents 
  before the March IETF meeting cutoff date (cutoff is March 8).