network management

This document provides guidelines and documents best current practice for operating authoritative DNS servers, recursive resolvers, and stub resolvers in a mixed IPv4/IPv6 environment. This document recommends that both authoritative DNS servers and recursive resolvers support IPv4 and IPv6. It also provides guidance on how recursive DNS resolvers should select upstream DNS servers, including when IPv4-embedded IPv6 addresses are available.

This document obsoletes RFC 3901.

This document describes a BGP-based routing solution to establish end-to-end intent-aware paths across a multi-domain transport network. The transport network can span multiple service provider and customer network domains. The BGP intent-aware paths can be used to steer traffic flows for service routes that need a specific intent. This solution is called BGP Color-Aware Routing (BGP CAR).

This document describes the routing framework and BGP extensions to enable intent-aware routing using the BGP CAR solution. The solution defines two new BGP SAFIs (BGP CAR SAFI and BGP VPN CAR SAFI) for IPv4 and IPv6. It also defines an extensible Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) model for both SAFIs that allows multiple NLRI types to be defined for different use cases. Each type of NLRI contains key and TLV-based non-key fields for efficient encoding of different per-prefix information. This specification defines two NLRI types: Color-Aware Route NLRI and IP Prefix NLRI. It defines non-key TLV types for the MPLS label stack, SR-MPLS label index, and Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) Segment Identifiers (SIDs). This solution also defines a new Local Color Mapping (LCM) Extended Community.

This document specifies a mechanism referred to as "Intent-Driven Service Mapping". The mechanism uses BGP to express Intent-based association of overlay routes with underlay routes having specific Traffic Engineering (TE) characteristics satisfying a certain Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is achieved by defining new constructs to group underlay routes with sufficiently similar TE characteristics into identifiable classes (called "Transport Classes" or "TCs"), that overlay routes use as an ordered set to resolve reachability (Resolution Schemes) towards service endpoints. These constructs can be used, for example, to realize the "IETF Network Slice" defined in the TEAS Network Slices framework (RFC 9543).

Additionally, this document specifies protocol procedures for BGP that enable dissemination of service mapping information in a network that may span multiple cooperating administrative domains. These domains may be administered either by the same provider or by closely coordinating providers. A new BGP address family that leverages the procedures described in RFC 4364 ("BGP/MPLS IP Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)") and follows the NLRI encoding described in RFC 8277 ("Using BGP to Bind MPLS Labels to Address Prefixes") is defined to enable each advertised underlay route to be identified by its class. This new address family is called "BGP Classful Transport" (or "BGP CT").

This document provides implementation and operational considerations for using TLS Pre-Shared Keys (TLS-PSKs) with RADIUS/TLS (RFC 6614) and RADIUS/DTLS (RFC 7360). The purpose of the document is to help smooth the operational transition from the use of RADIUS/UDP to RADIUS/TLS.

This document discusses the properties, applicability, and operational considerations of Routing in Fat Trees (RIFT) in different network scenarios with the intention of providing a rough guide on how RIFT can be deployed to simplify routing operations in Clos topologies and their variations.

This document details considerations about how Internet of Things (IoT) devices use IP addresses and DNS names. These concerns become acute as network operators begin deploying Manufacturer Usage Descriptions (MUD), as specified in RFC 8520, to control device access.

Also, this document makes recommendations on when and how to use DNS names in MUD files.

DNS error reporting is a lightweight reporting mechanism that provides the operator of an authoritative server with reports on DNS resource records that fail to resolve or validate. A domain owner or DNS hosting organization can use these reports to improve domain hosting. The reports are based on extended DNS errors as described in RFC 8914.

When a domain name fails to resolve or validate due to a misconfiguration or an attack, the operator of the authoritative server may be unaware of this. To mitigate this lack of feedback, this document describes a method for a validating resolver to automatically signal an error to a monitoring agent specified by the authoritative server. The error is encoded in the QNAME; thus, the very act of sending the query is to report the error.

This memo contains the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the United States National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden in 2013. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, that of a security area director of the IETF, that of a human rights expert, and that of a computer science and affiliate law professor. The purpose of this memo is to provide some historical perspective, while at the same time offering a view as to what security and privacy challenges the technical community should consider. These essays do not represent a consensus view, but that of the individual authors.

This document describes an architecture that provides some assurance that service instances are running as expected. As services rely upon multiple subservices provided by a variety of elements, including the underlying network devices and functions, getting the assurance of a healthy service is only possible with a holistic view of all involved elements. This architecture not only helps to correlate the service degradation with symptoms of a specific network component but, it also lists the services impacted by the failure or degradation of a specific network component.

This document provides an overview of operational networking and transport protocol issues that pertain to the quality of experience (QoE) when streaming video and other high-bitrate media over the Internet.

This document explains the characteristics of streaming media delivery that have surprised network designers or transport experts who lack specific media expertise, since streaming media highlights key differences between common assumptions in existing networking practices and observations of media delivery issues encountered when streaming media over those existing networks.

Intent is an abstract, high-level policy used to operate a network. An intent-based management system includes an interface for users to input requests and an engine to translate the intents into the network configuration and manage their life cycle.

This document mostly discusses the concept of network intents, but other types of intents are also considered. Specifically, this document highlights stakeholder perspectives of intent, methods to classify and encode intent, and the associated intent taxonomy; it also defines relevant intent terms where necessary, provides a foundation for intent-related research, and facilitates solution development.

This document is a product of the IRTF Network Management Research Group (NMRG).

This document discusses manageability of the QUIC transport protocol and focuses on the implications of QUIC's design and wire image on network operations involving QUIC traffic. It is intended as a "user's manual" for the wire image to provide guidance for network operators and equipment vendors who rely on the use of transport-aware network functions.

This document describes the command/response protocol currently used in the management of Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units and other power devices often deployed in small offices and in IT installations subject to an erratic public power supply. The UPS units typically interface to an Attachment Daemon in the system they protect. This daemon is in turn polled by a Management Daemon that notifies users and system administrators of power supply incidents and automates system shutdown decisions. The commands and responses described by this document are exchanged between the UPS Attachment Daemon and the Management Daemon. The practice current when this protocol was first developed risks weak security, and this is addressed in the Security Considerations sections of this document.

This document updates RFCs 1123 and 1536. This document requires the operational practice of permitting DNS messages to be carried over TCP on the Internet as a Best Current Practice. This operational requirement is aligned with the implementation requirements in RFC 7766. The use of TCP includes both DNS over unencrypted TCP as well as over an encrypted TLS session. The document also considers the consequences of this form of DNS communication and the potential operational issues that can arise when this Best Current Practice is not upheld.

This document describes the Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) Proxy ARP/ND function augmented by the capability of the ARP/ND Extended Community. From that perspective, this document updates the EVPN specification to provide more comprehensive documentation of the operation of the Proxy ARP/ND function. The EVPN Proxy ARP/ND function and the ARP/ND Extended Community help operators of Internet Exchange Points, Data Centers, and other networks deal with IPv4 and IPv6 address resolution issues associated with large Broadcast Domains by reducing and even suppressing the flooding produced by address resolution in the EVPN network.

To protect user data and privacy, Internet transport protocols have supported payload encryption and authentication for some time. Such encryption and authentication are now also starting to be applied to the transport protocol headers. This helps avoid transport protocol ossification by middleboxes, mitigate attacks against the transport protocol, and protect metadata about the communication. Current operational practice in some networks inspect transport header information within the network, but this is no longer possible when those transport headers are encrypted.

This document discusses the possible impact when network traffic uses a protocol with an encrypted transport header. It suggests issues to consider when designing new transport protocols or features.

This document defines the Connectivity Provisioning Negotiation Protocol (CPNP), which is designed to facilitate the dynamic negotiation of service parameters.

CPNP is a generic protocol that can be used for various negotiation purposes that include (but are not necessarily limited to) connectivity provisioning services, storage facilities, Content Delivery Networks, etc.

Deployment of the BGPsec architecture and protocols has many operational considerations. This document attempts to collect and present the most critical and universal. Operational practices are expected to evolve as BGPsec is formalized and initially deployed.

This document defines the scope and set of requirements for the Security Automation and Continuous Monitoring (SACM) architecture, data model, and transfer protocols. The requirements and scope are based on the agreed-upon use cases described in RFC 7632.

The loop-free alternates (LFAs) computed following the current remote-LFA specification guarantees only link protection. The resulting remote-LFA next hops (also called "PQ-nodes") may not guarantee node protection for all destinations being protected by it.

This document describes an extension to the remote-loop-free-based IP fast reroute mechanisms that specifies procedures for determining whether or not a given PQ-node provides node protection for a specific destination. The document also shows how the same procedure can be utilized for the collection of complete characteristics for alternate paths. Knowledge about the characteristics of all alternate paths is a precursor to applying the operator-defined policy for eliminating paths not fitting the constraints.

This document discusses both use cases and operational experience with Multipath TCP (MPTCP) in real networks. It lists several prominent use cases where Multipath TCP has been considered and is being used. It also gives insight to some heuristics and decisions that have helped to realize these use cases and suggests possible improvements.

Some DHCP options carry unique identifiers. These identifiers can enable device tracking even if the device administrator takes care of randomizing other potential identifications like link-layer addresses or IPv6 addresses. The anonymity profiles are designed for clients that wish to remain anonymous to the visited network. The profiles provide guidelines on the composition of DHCP or DHCPv6 messages, designed to minimize disclosure of identifying information.

The Strengthening the Internet (STRINT) workshop assembled one hundred participants in London for two days in early 2014 to discuss how the technical community, and in particular the IETF and the W3C, should react to Pervasive Monitoring and more generally how to strengthen the Internet in the face of such attacks. The discussions covered issues of terminology, the role of user interfaces, classes of mitigation, some specific use cases, transition strategies (including opportunistic encryption), and more. The workshop ended with a few high-level recommendations, that it is believed could be implemented and could help strengthen the Internet. This is the report of that workshop.

Note that this document is a report on the proceedings of the workshop. The views and positions documented in this report are those of the workshop participants and do not necessarily reflect IAB views and positions.

This memo documents a sampling of use cases for securely aggregating configuration and operational data and evaluating that data to determine an organization's security posture. From these operational use cases, we can derive common functional capabilities and requirements to guide development of vendor-neutral, interoperable standards for aggregating and evaluating data relevant to security posture.

This document specifies the NULL Authentication method and the ID_NULL Identification Payload ID Type for Internet Key Exchange Protocol version 2 (IKEv2). This allows two IKE peers to establish single-side authenticated or mutual unauthenticated IKE sessions for those use cases where a peer is unwilling or unable to authenticate or identify itself. This ensures IKEv2 can be used for Opportunistic Security (also known as Opportunistic Encryption) to defend against Pervasive Monitoring attacks without the need to sacrifice anonymity.

Pervasive monitoring is a technical attack that should be mitigated in the design of IETF protocols, where possible.

This document analyzes the security implications of employing IPv6 fragmentation with Neighbor Discovery (ND) messages. It updates RFC 4861 such that use of the IPv6 Fragmentation Header is forbidden in all Neighbor Discovery messages, thus allowing for simple and effective countermeasures for Neighbor Discovery attacks. Finally, it discusses the security implications of using IPv6 fragmentation with SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) and formally updates RFC 3971 to provide advice regarding how the aforementioned security implications can be mitigated.

This document describes a set of practices for operating the DNS with security extensions (DNSSEC). The target audience is zone administrators deploying DNSSEC.

The document discusses operational aspects of using keys and signatures in the DNS. It discusses issues of key generation, key storage, signature generation, key rollover, and related policies.

This document obsoletes RFC 4641, as it covers more operational ground and gives more up-to-date requirements with respect to key sizes and the DNSSEC operations.

This memo proposes an extensible Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) monitoring framework for extending the RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) with a new RTCP Extended Reports (XR) block type to report new metrics regarding media transmission or reception quality. In this framework, a new XR block should contain a single metric or a small number of metrics relevant to a single parameter of interest or concern, rather than containing a number of metrics that attempt to provide full coverage of all those parameters of concern to a specific application. Applications may then "mix and match" to create a set of blocks that cover their set of concerns. Where possible, a specific block should be designed to be reusable across more than one application, for example, for all of voice, streaming audio, and video. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

This document gives an overview of the IETF network management standards and summarizes existing and ongoing development of IETF Standards Track network management protocols and data models. The document refers to other overview documents, where they exist and classifies the standards for easy orientation. The purpose of this document is, on the one hand, to help system developers and users to select appropriate standard management protocols and data models to address relevant management needs. On the other hand, the document can be used as an overview and guideline by other Standard Development Organizations or bodies planning to use IETF management technologies and data models. This document does not cover Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) technologies on the data-path, e.g., OAM of tunnels, MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) OAM, and pseudowire as well as the corresponding management models. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

The rise of spam and other anti-social behavior on the Internet has led to the creation of shared DNS-based lists (DNSBLs) of IP addresses or domain names intended to help guide email filtering. This memo summarizes guidelines of accepted best practice for the management of public DNSBLs by their operators as well as for the proper use of such lists by mail server administrators (DNSBL users), and it provides useful background for both parties. It is not intended to advise on the utility or efficacy of particular DNSBLs or the DNSBL concept in general, nor to assist end users with questions about spam. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

The Transport Profile of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS-TP) is a packet-based transport technology based on the MPLS Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE) and pseudowire (PW) data-plane architectures.

This document describes a framework to support a comprehensive set of Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) procedures that fulfill the MPLS-TP OAM requirements for fault, performance, and protection-switching management and that do not rely on the presence of a control plane.

This document is a product of a joint Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) / International Telecommunications Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) effort to include an MPLS Transport Profile within the IETF MPLS and Pseudowire Emulation Edge-to-Edge (PWE3) architectures to support the capabilities and functionalities of a packet transport network as defined by the ITU-T.

This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

It has often been the case that manageability considerations have been retrofitted to protocols after they have been specified, standardized, implemented, or deployed. This is sub-optimal. Similarly, new protocols or protocol extensions are frequently designed without due consideration of manageability requirements.

The Operations Area has developed "Guidelines for Considering Operations and Management of New Protocols and Protocol Extensions" (RFC 5706), and those guidelines have been adopted by the Path Computation Element (PCE) Working Group.

Previously, the PCE Working Group used the recommendations contained in this document to guide authors of Internet-Drafts on the contents of "Manageability Considerations" sections in their work. This document is retained for historic reference. This document defines a Historic Document for the Internet community.

A Path Computation Element (PCE)-based architecture has been specified for the computation of Traffic Engineering (TE) Label Switched Paths (LSPs) in Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) networks in the context of single or multiple domains (where a domain refers to a collection of network elements within a common sphere of address management or path computational responsibility such as Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) areas and Autonomous Systems). Path Computation Clients (PCCs) send computation requests to PCEs, and these may forward the requests to and cooperate with other PCEs forming a "path computation chain".

In PCE-based environments, it is thus critical to monitor the state of the path computation chain for troubleshooting and performance monitoring purposes: liveness of each element (PCE) involved in the PCE chain and detection of potential resource contention states and statistics in terms of path computation times are examples of such metrics of interest. This document specifies procedures and extensions to the Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP) in order to gather such information. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

New protocols or protocol extensions are best designed with due consideration of the functionality needed to operate and manage the protocols. Retrofitting operations and management is sub-optimal. The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to authors and reviewers of documents that define new protocols or protocol extensions regarding aspects of operations and management that should be considered. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

Wireless LAN product architectures have evolved from single autonomous access points to systems consisting of a centralized Access Controller (AC) and Wireless Termination Points (WTPs). The general goal of centralized control architectures is to move access control, including user authentication and authorization, mobility management, and radio management from the single access point to a centralized controller.

This specification defines the Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) Protocol Binding Specification for use with the IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network protocol. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

This document describes experiences of operational requirements and several considerations for ENUM-based softswitches concerning call routing between two Korean Voice over IP (VoIP) carriers, gained during the ENUM pre-commercial trial hosted by the National Internet Development Agency of Korea (NIDA) in 2006.

These experiences show that an interim solution can maintain the stability of ongoing commercial softswitch system operations during the initial stage of ENUM service, where the DNS does not have sufficient data for the majority of calls. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

A single physical link can have multiple prefixes assigned to it. In that environment, end hosts might have multiple IP addresses and be required to use them selectively. RFC 3484 defines default source and destination address selection rules and is implemented in a variety of OSs. But, it has been too difficult to use operationally for several reasons. In some environments where multiple prefixes are assigned on a single physical link, the host using the default address selection rules will experience some trouble in communication. This document describes the possible problems that end hosts could encounter in an environment with multiple prefixes. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This document describes and evaluates strategies to enhance Mobile IPv6 Route Optimization, on the basis of existing proposals, in order to motivate and guide further research in this context. This document is a product of the IP Mobility Optimizations (MobOpts) Research Group. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

Entities responsible for distributing work across a group of systems traditionally do not know a great deal about the ability of the applications on those systems to complete the work in a satisfactory fashion. Workload management systems traditionally know a great deal about the health of applications, but have little control over the rate in which these applications receive work. The Server/Application State Protocol (SASP) provides a mechanism for load balancers and workload management systems to communicate better ways of distributing the existing workload to the group members. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This memo defines a Media Delivery Index (MDI) measurement that can be used as a diagnostic tool or a quality indicator for monitoring a network intended to deliver applications such as streaming media, MPEG video, Voice over IP, or other information sensitive to arrival time and packet loss. It provides an indication of traffic jitter, a measure of deviation from nominal flow rates, and a data loss at-a-glance measure for a particular flow. For instance, the MDI may be used as a reference in characterizing and comparing networks carrying UDP streaming media. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This memo presents operational considerations and issues with IPv6 Domain Name System (DNS), including a summary of special IPv6 addresses, documentation of known DNS implementation misbehavior, recommendations and considerations on how to perform DNS naming for service provisioning and for DNS resolver IPv6 support, considerations for DNS updates for both the forward and reverse trees, and miscellaneous issues. This memo is aimed to include a summary of information about IPv6 DNS considerations for those who have experience with IPv4 DNS. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

For scalability purposes, multiple data links can be combined to form a single traffic engineering (TE) link. Furthermore, the management of TE links is not restricted to in-band messaging, but instead can be done using out-of-band techniques. This document specifies a link management protocol (LMP) that runs between a pair of nodes and is used to manage TE links. Specifically, LMP will be used to maintain control channel connectivity, verify the physical connectivity of the data links, correlate the link property information, suppress downstream alarms, and localize link failures for protection/restoration purposes in multiple kinds of networks. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

This document details the Synchronous Optical Network (SONET)/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) technology-specific information needed when sending Link Management Protocol (LMP) test messages. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

This document provides a framework for the operation and management of Layer 3 Virtual Private Networks (L3VPNs). This framework intends to produce a coherent description of the significant technical issues that are important in the design of L3VPN management solutions. The selection of specific approaches, and making choices among information models and protocols are outside the scope of this document. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This document discusses SMTP operational experiences in IPv4/v6 dual stack environments. As IPv6-capable SMTP servers are deployed, it has become apparent that certain configurations of MX records are necessary for stable dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) SMTP operation. This document clarifies the existing problems in the transition period between IPv4 SMTP and IPv6 SMTP. It also defines operational requirements for stable IPv4/v6 SMTP operation.

This document does not define any new protocol. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace for the Web3D Consortium (Web3D) for naming persistent resources such as technical documents and specifications, Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and Extensible 3D (X3D) files and resources, Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Type Definitions (DTDs), XML Schemas, namespaces, style sheets, media assets, and other resources produced or managed by Web3D. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

The guiding principles in the design of IP network management were

simplicity and no centralized control. The best effort service

paradigm was a result of the original management principles and the

other way around. New methods to distinguish the service given to

one set of packets or flows relative to another are well underway.

However, as IP networks evolve the management approach of the past

may not apply to the QoS-capable network envisioned by some for the

future. We examine some of the areas of impact that QoS is likely

to have on management and look at some questions that remain to be

addressed.

This memo describes the management and operational requirements for the address and routing parameter area ("arpa") domain. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.

This memo discusses different approaches to configure networks and identifies a set of configuration management requirements for IP-based networks. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

The purpose of this document is to explore the problems of defining a Service management framework and to examine some of the issues that still need to be resolved. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This document defines a protocol for generating Link-Quality-Reports. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

This memo describes a model for operational statistics in the Internet. This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. This document defines a model and protocol for a set of tools which could be used by NSPs and Network Operation Centers (NOCs) to share data among themselves and with customers. This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.

Network administrators gather data related to the performance, utilization, usability and growth of their data network. The amount of raw data gathered is usually quite large, typically ranging somewhere between several megabytes to several gigabytes of data each month. Few (if any) tools exist today for the sharing of that raw data among network operators or between a network service provider (NSP) and its customers. This document defines a model and protocol for a set of tools which could be used by NSPs and Network Operation Centers (NOCs) to share data among themselves and with customers.

The goal of this document is to unite regionally operated X.400 services on the various continents into one GO-MHS Community (as seen from an end-user's point of view). This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.

The goal of this FYI memo is to provide an update to FYI 2, RFC 1147 [1], which provided practical information to site administrators and network managers. This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard.

This memo defines a simple application-layer protocol by which management information for a gateway may be inspected or altered by remote users. This proposal is intended only as an interim response to immediate gateway monitoring needs.

This RFC specifies the Host Monitoring Protocol used to collect information from various types of hosts in the Internet. Designers of Internet communications software are encouraged to consider this protocol as a means of monitoring the behavior of their creations.