Working Group: NFSv4
Area Director: David Harrington
Document Author/Shepherd: Spencer Shepler (sshepler@microsoft.com)
Internet Draft:
draft-ietf-nfsv4-federated-fs-admin-09.txt
Note: as background for this review, please review
"Requirements for Federated File Systems" published as RFC 5716http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5716.txt
(1.a) Spencer Shepler (sshepler@microsoft.com) is the document shepherd.
I have reviewed the document and believe it is ready as an RFC.
(1.b) This document and the mechanisms it represents have been
reviewed within and outside of the NFSv4 working group.
The protocol defined in this I-D has been prototyped and
a level of interoperability has already been achieved.
(1.c) The document shepherd has not identified any further
review or input as required.
(1.d) The document shepherd is comfortable with the contents
of the I-D and the mechanisms it represents. What comments
or feedback provided to the document authors have been
in addressed in this or earlier versions.
An IPR disclosure on the FedFS documents has been made.
From the minutes of the last NFSv4 WG meeting:
"US 7,933,921 April 26, 2011, Referent-controlled location
resolution of resources in a federated distributed
system. Royalty-Free, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory
License to All Implementers. License to be submitted to IETF
per usual process."
No substantive commentary has occurred on the WG alias.
Given the licensing terms presented by Netapp, it is the
expectation of the shepherd that the working group will
NOT take action in response to the disclosure.
(1.e) There is full NFSv4 working group consensus behind this document.
There have been no major disagreements for the lifetime of this
document and certainly no outstanding issues.
(1.f) There have been no discussion of appeal or discontent
with this I-D.
(1.g) The document shepherd has reviewd the document with
the ID nits in mind.
(1.h) The document has correctly divided references into
normative and informative groupings.
A normative reference dependency does exist that is
still "in process". While the normative reference is
correct, it does not block the review and approval of
this document. The reference is for the RFC3530bis work
currently active within the working group (NFSv4.0).
RFC3530bis is complete and waiting inclusion of 3 edits
and should be ready for shepherding to AD by Sept 2011.
An informative reference dependency exists for the
other FedFS document "draft-ietf-nfsv4-federated-fs-protocol-11"
Thus these two documents need to move together through
the publication process. These two documents should be
reviewed together to provide appropriate context.
(1.i) An IANA section does exist and it is appropriate for the I-D.
No new registries have been defined by this I-D.
(1.j) This document defines an RPC program (RFC5531) using the
XDR language (RFC4506). The I-D has been written in a style
that the defined XDR can be automatically extracted from
the I-D and then postprocessed by common "rpcgen" IDL
compilers. This process has been validated to work
correctly.
(1.k) <announcement is as follows>
Technical Summary
This document describes the administration protocol for a
federated file system that enables file access and namespace
traversal across collections of independently administered
fileservers. The protocol specifies a set of interfaces by which
fileservers with different administrators can form a fileserver
federation that provides a namespace composed of the filesystems
physically hosted on and exported by the constituent fileservers.
Working Group Summary
The FedFS administration protocol as to be used with NFSv4 file servers
is an important component to providing enterprise usable federated
NFSv4 file systems. Combined with the NSDB Protocol for Federated
Filesystems, and NFSv4 protocols a complete solution is possible
and provides substantial utility.
Document Quality
Not only is the Federated FS Admin document complete, readable and
useful as a guide to implementation and interoperability, this has
been proven by at least two prototype implementations that have
been built by those authoring the document. This is an important
culture of the NFSv4 working group and has become the norm of
behavior for the work product generated by the working group.