[Babel-users] IETF News and background

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Dear all,

Matthieu, Markus, Steven, David, myself and some other 1200 people have
spent the last week at the IETF 93 meeting in Prague, in the Czech Republic.
It was a lot of fun, and we learnt a lot.

The main interest to me was the Homenet working group [1], which aims to
produce a set of specifications that enable autonomously configured
multi-link home networks.  Think setting up a few routers in your home,
but doing that without resorting to either bridging or manual configuration.

Right now, there are three sides to the Homenet work:

  - the HNCP configuration protocol, which is a roaring success, with an
    almost complete set of specifications [2,3,4] and two independent
    implementations [5,6];

  - the choice of a routing protocol to accompany HNCP, with the WG stuck
    and unable to decide between Babel and a subset of IS-IS [7];

  - some DNS and mDNS stuff that I don't fully understand.

One of the arguments against Babel is that, while documented within IETF
RFCs, it is not an IETF standard.  For that reason, Alia Atlas, Alvaro
Retana and Joel Halpern were kind enough to organise a "Babel Side Meeting"
last Thursday.  It was good to explain Babel to some of the Wise People at
the IETF, and it seems to me that they get it.

Margaret (Wasserman) Cullen was kind enough to set up an IETF mailing list
for Babel,

  https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/babel

to which you are all welcome to subscribe.  I believe that this list might
be subject to the IETF Note Well[8], which basically says that anything you
say can be used for IETF work.  Any discussion about standardising Babel
at the IETF should go to babel at ietf; any other Babel-related discussions,
especially support questions relating to the implementation, should still
go to babel-users.

I'm not quite sure what the next steps towards standardising Babel are,
I'll let you know when that becomes clear to me.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/wg/homenet/
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/wg/homenet/draft-ietf-homenet-hncp/
[3] https://tools.ietf.org/wg/homenet/draft-ietf-homenet-dncp/
[4] https://tools.ietf.org/wg/homenet/draft-ietf-homenet-prefix-assignment/
[5] https://github.com/sbyx/hnetd/
[6] https://github.com/jech/shncpd/
[7] https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-lamparter-homenet-isis-profile-00.txt
[8] https://www.ietf.org/about/note-well.html

-- Juliusz