Subject: Intent to close the ssh working group

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:48:41 -0400

Based on community feedback it is my intent to close this working
group as soon as the publickey-subsystem draft is either approved by
the IESG or stalls.

Bill has indicated he believes the draft is ready for publication.

The mailing list will remain open.

If the authors of the URI draft update it to include only the ssh URI,
I will accept it as an individual submission after the working group
is closed.  It can keep the same name.

Other ssh drafts may be submitted as individual drafts
(draft-authorname-blah-xx.txt).  Authors are requested to inform
[email-masked] that their individual draft replaces the
appropriate draft-ietf-secsh draft.  This message should be included
in the ID submission to notify the secretariat that I'm approving
allowing an individual draft to replace a working group draft.

I will not sponsor the filexfer draft for publication as an IETF
documents.  The authors may talk to the applications or transport area
about forming a new working group to do the work; may request that the
rfc editor publish an informational document as an independent
submission; or drop the drafts.

Sam Hartman
Security Area Director

---

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 15:27:57 -0400

> submission; or drop the drafts.

For completeness, I'll point out that another possibility would be to find 
some other AD to sponsor the document as an individual IETF submission.

I suspect that the set of people likely to be interested in working on a 
filesystem access protocol is different than the set where were interested 
in working on the core ssh protocol.  So, it's entirely possible that a BOF 
on this subject may produce enough interest to form a WG.

Personally, I'd very much like to see an actual _file transfer_ protocol 
that I can run over SSH.  Maybe SCP is sufficient for this; I don't know.

-- Jeff

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From: Nicolas Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:05:46 -0500

> some other AD to sponsor the document as an individual IETF submission.

Well, yes.

> on this subject may produce enough interest to form a WG.

For one item?  Note that the security area wouldn't be a very good home
for this.  The transport area seems more appropriate, particularly for a
filesystem protocol.

> that I can run over SSH.  Maybe SCP is sufficient for this; I don't know.

SCP is not sufficient.

Nico
--

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From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:23:37 -0400

On Friday, August 18, 2006 05:05:46 PM -0500 Nicolas Williams 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> filesystem access protocol is different than the set where were
>> interested  in working on the core ssh protocol.  So, it's entirely
>> possible that a BOF  on this subject may produce enough interest to form
>> a WG.
>

It's only one item if you make it huge and monolithic.  If, instead, you 
break it out into a manageable base document and a set of optional 
extensions, it becomes several items.  It also offers the opportunity to 
take a step back and figure out what the goals and requirements actually 
are.  So far, it seems like they get rehashed with every proposed 
extension, and it's starting to get hard to tell what the consensus is. 
About the only thing that's clear to me is that the people working on this 
project mostly are interested in something like a filesystem, rather than 
something like a file transfer protocol.

I agree the security area is not the right home for this.  I'm inclined to 
think the right home is actually the apps area; I've never understood why 
NFS was in transport and not apps.  Perhaps someone else knows.

-- Jeff

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From: "Jeff P. Van Dyke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:15:35 -0600

> NFS was in transport and not apps.  Perhaps someone else knows.

Some have argued that the recent additions to the SFTP draft make it more
like a filesystem.

I would argue the basic implementation that most folks are using (SFTP v3)
is more like a filesystem than a file transfer protocol.  In particular,
there is no put or get in SFTP v3 - instead it has open, close, read,
write, etc.

I'm not sure where the work or WG belongs, but I would like to see the SFTP
draft completed (acknowledging that is has always been more filesystem than
file transfer) - even if we had to strip it down to core functionality and
push off some of the newer stuff to extensions.

I'd also be very supportive of a file transfer draft too.  However, I'm not
sure there is enough consensus to make this happen :-)  I think having a
documented standard for transferring files using more of a put and get
mechanism would address many of the real world issues (e.g. performance and
logging) that SFTP has.

--Jeff V.

---

From: Joseph Galbraith <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 10:59:14 -0600

Jeff P. Van Dyke wrote:
>> It's only one item if you make it huge and monolithic.  If, instead, 
>> you break it out into a manageable base document and a set of optional 
>> extensions, it becomes several items.  It also offers the opportunity 
>> to take a step back and figure out what the goals and requirements 
>> actually are.  So far, it seems like they get rehashed with every 
>> proposed extension, and it's starting to get hard to tell what the 
>> consensus is. About the only thing that's clear to me is that the 
>> people working on this project mostly are interested in something like 
>> a filesystem, rather than something like a file transfer protocol.
>>
>> I agree the security area is not the right home for this.  I'm 
>> inclined to think the right home is actually the apps area; I've never 
>> understood why NFS was in transport and not apps.  Perhaps someone 
>> else knows.
>>
>> -- Jeff
> 

I agree with both the Jeffs.

I would like to see SFTP, the file system protocol,
finished.  I would also like to see a 'file transfer' protocol,
be it an separate document describing an extension to the SFTP
or a completely independent protocol (which could range any
where from a document describing how use SSH as a transport
for FTP to an entirely new protocol.)

I believe moving to an area where we might have more
people interested could help this work, and help us to determine
what we need to do in order to produce a draft which has enough
consensus behind it to get published.  I don't think the current
draft meets that criteria.

I think stepping back and defining our goals and producing
several documents instead of one monolith would help immensely.

Thanks,

Joseph