1. Summary
Jan Seedorf is the document shepherd for draft-ietf-alto-xdom-disc. Mirja
Kühlewind is the responsible Area Director.
When the ALTO WG was last re-chartered, an item was added to the charter to
produce “One or more alternatives to the base ALTO server discovery mechanism”.
draft-ietf-alto-xdom-disc targets exactly this item and presents an alternative
way for ALTO-server discovery, addressing the ALTO charter milestone “Submit
alternative server discovery document”.
RFC 7286 specifies a mechanism to discover an ALTO server in the ALTO client’s
network domain based on DHCP and DNS. However, in certain scenarios an ALTO
client may want or need to discover other ALTO servers, possibly outside its
own network domain. draft-ietf-alto-xdom-disc specifies such a mechanism, i.e.
for an ALTO client to discover an ALTO server outside its own network domain.
This “cross-domain” server discovery is technically based on reverse DNS
lookups using ALTO-specific U-NAPTR records.
The working group is targeting this document as Standards Track, which is
appropriate as the document specifies a new mechanism on how to use reverse DNS
lookups for ALTO server discovery.
2. Review and Consensus
The initial draft for this document is from 2014. The document has been
presented at multiple IETF meetings and discussed on the mailing list. It is
well-known in the ALTO WG and there is clear consensus to standardise the
proposed mechanism. A WGLC was issued on April 17, 2018, on
draft-ietf-alto-xdom-disc-02, and a review with several comments was done by
Sabine Randriamasy; draft-ietf-alto-xdom-disc-03 addresses these comments, in
particular adding an extensive example of how to use the new server-discovery
mechanism. Previously, a detailed review had already been produced on
draft-ietf-alto-xdom-disc-01 by Richard Yang and and others, resulting in
substantial updates on the document.
In summary, there is clear support and consensus for draft-ietf-alto-xdom-disc
in the ALTO WG, and it provides a very useful extension to the base ALTO
protocol. A WGLC has successfully been passed, and extensive reviews were
provided by various members of the WG and have all been addressed.
3. Intellectual Property
The shepherd confirms that each author has stated to him that to the best of
his/her (i.e. the author’s) knowledge, all IPR related to this document has
been disclosed.
4. Other Points
All normative references are ok (with respect to RFC 3967) as they are all
towards documents with standards-level “Proposed Standards”, “Internet
Standard”, or “BCP”.