Technical Committee Report to Council 20/08/04

— filed under: IPv6

A meeting of the Technical Committee was held at the InternetNZ Offices on 1 July 2004. Unfortunately it was the day before the Council meeting, it ran late, and minutes and reports were not available for the Council meeting. Council also had a very full agenda and David Harris and Brendan Murray had a meeting with Mike Pearson of the State Services Commission following it, so the tech report did not really fit into the meeting. This report covers that last meeting.

Brendan Murray won't be at the August Council Meeting (apologies have been made) and will have to rely on other Council members of tech to expand and report on the meeting.

This was the first meeting in a very long time. The mailing list is very quiet, there is a new chair, and there was a feeling that Tech was being bypassed. There was a perceived need for a re-commitment to the purposes of Tech from both the committee members and the executive. Members of the executive were present for this item, which was extremely valuable. After a fair bit of debate it was agreed that Tech does fill an important purpose for InternetNZ.

as an entity should continue to exist
it must meet regularly
exists to report to Council
does not exist to generate the "big reports", that is the role of working groups which may be spun off from Tech
does provide an advisory service to operational areas of InternetNZ
will review the Strategic Plan to see where we are for the next 12 months

There is an existing action item relating to video conferencing. There are two parts to this: a simple requirement to provide a 2-ended point-to-point videoconferening solution between an Auckland office and the InternetNZ offices. The other is the larger and more general need to "eat our own dog food" - to use the internet as a means of meeting and communication for InternetNZ.

There is a identified solution to the point-to-point problem. It is essentially an operational matter since we are talking about a commercial product. We recommend that Peter Macaulay borrow a couple of units, try it out and if it suits he might as well just do it! Peter has some units set up.

The larger problem may be soluble using an existing multicast trail setup that Michael Sutton has in place. Michael volunteered to see if it is easy to convert what he has into a suitable solution for unicast video conferencing. At this point we are looking at something simple to get going. If it turns out that we need to look at more complicated solutions we will come back to the issue.

APTLD Representative

This item arose from a request from Peter Dengate-Thrush regarding a need to get some representation on the APTLD Technical Committee. Tech was a little uncertain on the exact profile of a suitable person. After talking with Peter at the following Council meeting it became clear that the group isn't that active, but might need a bit of lift. Tech decided that the chair of the Technical Committee of InternetNZ would be the usual representative to the APTLD Technical Committee, but would recommend on a meeting by meeting basis a need to attend, not attend and/or send an alternate.

In the meantime Peter has arranged for Brendan Murray to join the APTLD Tech Committee mailing list (it isn't very active) and we'll see what arises.

CA and Certificates

There is a possibility that govt might want to get involved to provide some resource to make this happen. There is good reason for InternetNZ (or its agents like NZRS, say) to get involved in this. But we all believe that there are significant costs. We do believe there will be a need for government involvement.

David Harris volunteered to look at the costs and ramifications. This isn't to usurp anyone elses plans, but to get our understanding solid. We want to know how we might fund and manage the whole CA issue for SSL certs etc. Brendan Murray and Michael Sutton will help David. Once that is done we will have some room for scoping the real need for a project or task force to take it forward. No recommendation to council, and it looks like there hasn't been time to fit this one into actions just yet. It will be revisited at the next tech meeting.

Ipv6 Trial and Implementation Roadmap

There is lots of push from central government wanting progresson IPv6 (despite china having apparently moved all the way to IPv9 ). NZ is a bit behind in developing an Ipv6 forum (there is an ipv6forum.org and ipv6forum.org.uk, for example, but no ipv6forum.org.nz!) Part of the problem is that there is no real champion of Ipv6 in this country. We think perhaps that the best approach might be to get together a seminar at NZNOG or similar. There is a need to talk to Andy Linton, and that will be arranged later in the year. At the same time we need to look at sponsorship for a WIX F-Root server.

DNSSEC

Despite Council's decision to put some money into making this happen, there are a bunch of technical issues that have arisen with regard to the ability to use DNSSEC records to walk a domain. Don Stokes gave a good presentation on this. The problems are clearly significant. It would appear that InternetNZ really should be taking a position and taking part in the BIND Forum ( http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/forum/forum.php ) and perhaps the DNS-MODA group. This is more than an implementation issue.

Don Stokes will put together a position paper on this. He was going to wait until the NZRS representative gets back from KL since he will have picked up more of the global position from the ICANN meetings.

SSL Certs for InternetNZ Web and applications

This is an operational matter. We requested Peter Macaulay to arrange commercial certificates for the InternetNZ servers (especially with things like OpenExchange coming onstream). That solves part of the SSL problem immediately. Later discussion with John Vorstermans brought up the fact that there were already some commercial certificates on secure.internetnz.net.nz, something we did not know. So it is all progressing fairly well.

Travel Fund

Simon Riley raised this issue. We would like to recommend that InternetNZ provide and announce something along the lines of:

"InternetNZ has a small fund to provide travel assistance to people that have made a significant contribution to the internet in NZ for conference or similar travel where they will be presenting a NZ perspective"

Internet Innovation Fund

Simon Riley again. Worthwhile discussion. We recommend that InternetNZ use part of its project fund to

"Provide an Internet Innovation Fund, to support worthy projects that promote the internet in New Zealand. Projects might include some technological development, or a work experience program to develop internet engineers. InternetNZ will be developing application guidelines and seeking applications soon"

PGP

In accord with good practice and security on the internet, we think it is a good thing to digitally sign and encrypt communications. One way that we can encourage such use is to recommend that all InternetNZ email communications should be signed or encrypted with PGP (or gnupg) keys, that InternetNZ should have signing keys for the office and for official communications. Part of this is operational and Peter Macaulay is encouraged to work on this. With a new council after the AGM this would be a good time to arrange key signing at the first council meeting of the new term. (Perhaps key signatures printed on the official InternetNZ business cards would also be a good thing?)

We recommend to council:

"That all members of council should use pgp or gpg for all official communications, that all documents on the web site be accompanied by a digital signature to ensure their veracity. This should apply with the new council."

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