I was fortunate to attend IETF 121 in Dublin earlier this month. This was my first time attending the in person conference so I thought that I might write down some notes.

REGEXT

My main interest is in the REGEXT WG work. They are responsible for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) and RDAP (the replacement to the WHOIS protocol) sets of specifications. EPP is the protocol that is used by a lot of registries (managers of top level domain names like .se (a country code TLD more commonly written ccTLD) or .com (a generic TLD more comonlly written gTLD)) as the communication protocol between them and registrars.

While the WG meetings were somewhat heavy on RDAP (something that I’m only watching at the moment as we are not implementing it just yet) some highlights from the EPP side was a nice presentation from James Gould of Verisign on implementing EPP over HTTP (draft rfc) and QUIC (draft rfc), which got me interested in experimental support of these in our own EPP server. It would be especially interesting to see if there are any performance gains in doing EPP over QUIC instead of just plain TCP over TLS as is standard today.

The draft specification adding the ability for registrars to set their own TTL values for NS, DS and DNAME posts was also discussed and pushed ever closer to getting it published. EPP mapping for DNS TTL .

DNS

As a registry one of our core responsibilities is to create a big old zone file to make sure our little part of the internet works as intended. Meaning that DNS is something we care about, a lot. While I (no longer) mainly work on the DNS stuff I still attended some of the DNS WG sessions.

Somewhat biased since one of the authors is my colleague I thought the generalized DNS notifications was the most interesting stuff. This draft aims to add notifies for delegation maintenance.

I also attended the DELEG session to just listen in, if you want to know more about what they are doing APNIC has a blog post about the problem: DELEG.

Experience as a first time attendee?

One thing is very clear when you attend an IETF event. The IETF know how to run a conference. When registering as a new attendee you were put on a mailing list and got all the info you ever needed to make the event as useful for you as possible. I did not attend any of the new participant functions, I was fortunate enough to be travelling with a seasoned participant and got my experience from that, but in hindsight attending the new participant dinner might have been a good idea!

Coda

All in all I had a blast and I hope to return again (and continue to participate online)!