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Concluded WG Wide Area Service Location (wasrv)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name Wide Area Service Location
Acronym wasrv
Area Internet Area (int)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-wasrv-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chair Erik Guttman

Final Charter for Working Group

There are a variety of remote remote services available on the
Internet.  These include file servers, telephony gateways, white pages,
and many others.  They are currently very difficult to discover.  Often
the name or network address of the service must be explicitely
configured with a client system. 

There are a variety of protocols available which could ease the
configuration of wide area services.  These would primarily function
through the use of storing a pointer to the service indirectly
and providing a resolution service (URN, DNS, LDAP, etc.)  None of them
are currently being used to solve the problem of wide area service
location, though each is used to solve specific service look-up
problems.

WASRV will specify the required architectures and protocols to make it
much easier to discover remote services.  In particular, we will seek to
define a mechanism which allows automatic configuration of clients which
are only aware of the attributes of a server they need in advance, not
its location.  The more dynamic and decentralized this service is, the
better.

Participants in the WASRV BOF are encouraged to read an internet draft
discussing the problem and suggesting directions for a solution to it:

   Rosenberg, Guttman, Moats, Schulzrinne, "WASRV Architectural
Principles", draft-rosenberg-wasrv-arch-00.txt

Participants may also wish to read proposed solutions to the WASRV
problem:

Rosenberg, Suter, Schulzrinne, "Wide Area Service Location",
   draft-ietf-svrloc-wasrv-01.txt

Moats, Hamilton, Leach, "Finding Stuff (How to discover services)",
  draft-ietf-svrloc-discovery-05.txt

Moats, Hamilton, "Advertising Services (Providing information to
   support service discovery)", draft-ietf-svrloc-advertising-03.txt