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|
Network Working Group J. Kempf
Request for Comments: 3082 J. Goldschmidt
Category: Experimental Sun Microsystems
March 2001
Notification and Subscription for SLP
Status of this Memo
This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
The Service Location Protocol (SLP) provides mechanisms whereby
service agent clients can advertise and user agent clients can query
for services. The design is very much demand-driven, so that user
agents only obtain service information when they specifically ask for
it. There exists another class of user agent applications, however,
that requires notification when a new service appears or disappears.
In the RFC 2608 design, these applications are forced to poll the
network to catch changes. In this document, we describe a protocol
for allowing such clients to be notified when a change occurs,
removing the need for polling.
1. Introduction
The Service Location Protocol (SLP) [1] provides a mechanism for
service agent (SA) clients to advertise network services and for user
agent (UA) clients to find them. The mechanism is demand-driven.
UAs obtain service information by actively querying for it, and do
not obtain any information unless they do so. While this design
satisfies the requirements for most applications, there are some
applications that require more timely information about the
appearance or disappearance in the services of interest.
Ideally, these applications would like to be notified when a new
service comes up or when a service disappears. In order to obtain
this information with SLP as described in RFC 2608, such applications
must poll the network to periodically refresh their local cache of
available service advertisements.
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
An example of such a client is a desktop GUI that wants to display
network service icons as soon as they appear to provide users with an
accurate picture of all services available to them.
Because polling is inefficient and wasteful of network and processor
resources, we would like to provide these applications a mechanism
whereby they can be explicitly notified of changes. In this
document, we describe a scalable mechanism allowing UAs to be
notified of changes in service availability.
2. Notation Conventions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [2].
3. Terminology
In this section, we present some additional terminology beyond that
in [1] and [3].
Notification - A message sent to an interested agent informing that
agent that a service has appeared or disappeared.
Subscription - A request to be informed about changes in service
availability for a particular service type and scopes.
4. Design Considerations
The primary design consideration in a notification protocol for SLP
is that we would like it to exhibit the same high degree of
scalability and robustness that the base SLP protocol exhibits.
Notification should work in small networks with only a few SAs, as
well as large enterprise networks with thousands of SAs and hundreds
of DAs. Small networks should not be required to deploy DAs in order
to receive the benefits of notification. We also want to assure that
notification in large networks does not cause heavy processing loads
to fall on any one particular SLP agent. This requires that the task
of notification be distributed rather than centralized, to avoid
loading down one agent with doing all the notification work.
Finally, we would like the notification scheme to be robust in the
face of DA failures, just as the base SLP design is.
An important consideration is that the UA clients obtain
notifications of SA events in a timely fashion. If a UA has
subscribed to notification for a particular service type, the UA
should receive such notification regardless of the state of
intervening DAs. SLP is transparent with respect to DAs supporting a
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
particular scope; that is, a UA can use any DA with a particular
scope and expect to get the same service advertisements.
Notifications should exhibit the same property. Whether or not a UA
receives a notification should not depend on the DA to which they
happen to connect. This preserves the DAs' identity as a pure cache.
Another goal is that the notification messages contain enough
information about the triggering event that the UA can determine
whether or not it is of interest in the large majority of cases
without having to issue another SLP request a priori. The UA may, of
course, issue an SLP request for related reasons, but it should not
have to issue a request to obtain more information on the event that
triggered the notification in most cases. This reduces the amount of
network traffic related to the event.
In order to simplify implementation, we would like to use similar
mechanisms for notification in large and small networks. The
mechanisms are not identical, obviously, but we want to avoid having
radically different mechanisms that require completely separate
implementations. Having similar mechanisms reduces the amount of
code in UA and SA clients.
A minor goal is to make use of existing SLP message types and
mechanisms wherever possible. This reduces the amount of code
necessary to implement the notification mechanism, because much code
can be reused between the base SLP and the notification mechanism.
In particular, we expect to make use of the SLP extension mechanism
in certain cases to support subscription.
5. Notification Design Description
In order to support scalability, we split the design into two parts.
A small network design is used when no DAs are present in the
network. A large network design is used in networks with DAs. The
following subsections describe the two designs.
5.1 Small Network Design
In networks without DAs, UAs are notified by an SA when the SA
initially appears, and when the SA disappears. This allows UAs to
know about the list of service types the SA supports. In small
networks, there is no centralized agent available to administer
subscriptions for newly appearing SAs. This rules out any kind of
subscription design in which a UA subscribes to notifications for a
particular service type in particular scopes of interest, because a
newly appearing SA can't tell whether or not there are any
subscriptions without a centralizing agent to tell it.
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
As a result, SAs perform notification when they come on line and
prior to shutting down regardless of their scope or service type, if
they are capable of performing notification. This means that a UA
receives notification of all types of changes for all scopes and
service types, and consequently must be prepared to filter out those
changes in which it is not interested (other scopes, other service
types).
The design requires SAs to perform notification by IP multicasting
(or broadcasting in IPv4 if multicast is not available) SLP SrvReg or
SrvDereg messages using the multicast transmit algorithm described in
Section 9.0. The port number for notifications is not the default
SLP port, because that port is only accessible to privileged users on
some operating systems, but rather the port 1847, as assigned by
IANA.
In IPv4, the SA performs multicast on the SLP multicast address
(239.255.255.253, default TTL 255) and is administratively scoped in
the same manner as SLP [4]. IPv4 UAs interested in notification join
the multicast group 239.255.255.253 and listen on port 1847. In
IPv6, the multicast is performed to the scoped IPv6 addresses for the
service type advertised, as described in [8]. The SA advertises on
all addresses up to and including the largest multicast scope that it
supports. IPv6 UAs interested in notification join the multicast
groups corresponding to the multicast scopes and service type in
which they are interested and listen on port 1847. For example, an
IPv6 UA that has access to site local scope and is interested in a
service type whose hash is 42, calculated according to the algorithm
in [8], joins the groups FF01:0:0:0:0:0:10042 through
FF05:0:0:0:0:0:10042.
5.2 Large Network Design
In networks with DAs, a DA supporting a particular scope can act as
an intermediary for administering UA subscriptions. A subscription
consists of a service type and a collection of scopes. A UA
interested in being notified about changes in a particular service
type attaches the Subscribe extension to a SrvRqst message sent to
the DA. The DA obtains multicast group addresses for notification
based on the algorithm described in Section 8.0 and puts them into a
NotifyAt extension which it attaches to the SrvRply. The UA listens
on the group addresses in the reply for notifications.
When a new subscription comes in, existing SAs are informed about the
subscription using the following procedure. The DA compares the
service type and scopes in the new subscription against a list of
existing subscriptions. If no previous subscription has the same
service type and scopes, the DA MUST multicast a DAAdvert, using the
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
multicast transmit algorithm described in Section 9.0, and MUST
include the NotifyAt extension with the multicast group addresses for
notification. If an existing subscription covers the same service
type and scopes as the new subscription, the DA MUST NOT multicast a
DAAdvert.
A DA MUST keep track of subscriptions it has arranged as well as
subscriptions arranged by other DAs in any scopes with which the DA
is configured. To avoid multiple multicast NotifyAt messages, a DA
MUST wait a random amount of time, uniformly distributed between 0
and 3 seconds before sending the multicast DAAdvert with NotifyAt.
During this period, the DA MUST listen for NotifyAt messages that
match the one from the new subscription. If a matching NotifyAt is
detected, the DA MUST not multicast.
When a new SA registers with a DA that has existing subscriptions,
the new SA is informed of notifications it should perform using the
following procedure. If the service type and scopes in the new SA's
SrvReg messages match an existing subscription, a NotifyAt containing
the multicast addresses for notification MUST be included in the
SrvAck. If the SA doesn't support notification, it simply ignores
the extension. If the service type and scopes in the new SA's SrvReg
do not match any existing subscriptions, the DA MUST NOT include a
NotifyAt.
The DA itself MUST also perform notification, according to the
multicast transmit algorithm, when a service advertisement times out.
Time-out of a service advertisement results in the DA multicasting a
SrvDereg for the deregistered URL. This allows interested UAs to be
informed of the service advertisement's demise even if the SA has
disappeared without deregistering. A DA MUST NOT perform
notification when it receives a SrvReg from an SA, however, that is
the job of the SA.
As in small networks, notification is performed primarily by SAs. If
an SA receives a DAAdvert or SrvAck with a NotifyAt extension and the
following conditions are met:
1. The SA supports notification.
2. The SA's service type matches the service type in the
NotifyAt extension.
3. The SA's scopes match one of the scopes of the NotifyAt
extension.
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
then the SA saves the multicast addresses that correspond to the
scopes and service types it supports. The SA MUST perform
notification immediately after the SA has performed the SrvReg or
SrvDereg with the DA. An SA that has detected a DA in its scopes
MUST NOT multicast any notifications unless it receives a NotifyAt
extension in a SrvAck with service type and scopes matching the SA's
service type and scopes.
6. Subscribe Extension
The Subscribe extension has the following format:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Extension Type = 0x0004 | Extension Length |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Ex. Len. (ct) | Abs. Type Fl. |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
The scope list and service type of the extension are taken from the
accompanying SrvRqst. The abstract type flag indicates whether the
UA is interested in hearing from all SAs advertising concrete
instances of an abstract type [3], and is only of interest if the
service type in the SrvRqst is a concrete type. If the flag is 1,
the UA is interested in hearing from all SAs advertising concrete
types having the same abstract type as the type of the SrvRqst. If
the flag is 0, the UA is only interested in hearing from SAs
supporting the particular concrete type in the SrvRqst. If the
service type in the accompanying SrvRqst is not a concrete type, the
flag is ignored.
7. NotifyAt Extension
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Extension Type = 0x0005 | Extension Length |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Ext. Len (ct) | Subscription Lifetime |SGL List Len. \
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|SGL L. Len (ct)| Scope/Group List \
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Length of Service Type Name | Service Type Name \
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
The service type name is in the same format as in the SrvRqst. The
scope/group list is a list of scope names and multicast group
addresses. The following ABNF [5] syntax describes the list:
sglist = sgitem / sgitem "," sglist
sgitem = scope-name ":" ip-addr
ip-addr = ipv4-number | ipv6-number
scope-name = ; See RFC 2608 for the format of scope names.
ipv4-number = 1*3DIGIT 3("." 1*3DIGIT)
ipv6-number = ;See RFC 2373 [9] Section 2.2
An example of a scope/group list for IPv4 is:
eng:239.255.255.42,corp:239.255.255.43
An example of a scope/group listfor IPv6 is:
eng:FF02:0:0:0:0:0:1:1042,corp:FF03:0:0:0:0:0:1:1042
The scope/group list gives the multicast addresses to use for
notifications involving the service type for the given scopes.
The service type name can be a simple type name, an abstract type
name, or a concrete type name. If the name is an abstract type name,
all SAs advertising the abstract type MUST notify. If the name is a
concrete or simple type name, ONLY those SAs advertising the simple
or concrete type MUST notify, others MUST NOT notify. A DA that
receives a subscription for a concrete type with the abstract type
flag set, MUST include the abstract type name in all the NotifyAt
messages it sends. If the DA receives a subscription for a concrete
type with the abstract type flag not set, the DA MUST NOT include the
abstract type, but rather MUST include the concrete type name.
There are three cases in which an agent may receive a NotifyAt
extension: in a SrvRply returned to a UA, in a multicast DAAdvert,
and in a SrvAck returned to an SA. The three subsections below
describe the response in each of these cases.
7.1 NotifyAt received with SrvRply
When a UA sends a SrvRqst with a Subscribe extension, the DA responds
with a SrvRply including a NotifyAt. The DA MUST NOT unicast a
NotifyAt to a UA with any other message and MUST NOT send a NotifyAt
unless a SrvRqst with a Subscribe extension was received.
The UA responds by setting up a multicast listener to the group
addresses included in the extension on the SLP notification port
1847. The UA MAY also want to note the expiration lifetime of the
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
subscription assigned by the DA, and reissue a subscription before
the lifetime expires.
7.2 NotifyAt received with Multicast DAAdvert
The DA multicasts a NotifyAt with a DAAdvert using the multicast
transmit algorithm when a UA has requested notification and the
scopes and service type in the subscription were not previously seen.
This message informs existing SAs having the service type and scopes
in the announcement that they should multicast notifications when
they shut down.
A receiving SA participating in notification responds by noting the
multicast address if the service type and scopes match. When the SA
is about to go down, the SA MUST first unicast a SrvDereg without
attribute tag list to its DAs (as per standard SLP), then it MUST
multicast the same SrvDereg message according to the multicast
transmit algorithm. The SA MUST cease performing notification when
the subscription lifetime expires, unless a subsequent NotifyAt is
received prolonging the subscription.
A UA that is performing passive DA detection will naturally also
receive the extension, but the UA SHOULD ignore the extension.
7.3 NotifyAt received with SrvAck
An SA can receive a NotifyAt with a SrvAck when it first comes up and
registers itself with a DA. If the DA has any subscriptions from UAs
for the service type and scopes represented by the SA, it MUST return
a NotifyAt with the SrvAck.
The SA upon receiving the NotifyAt immediately multicasts the same
SrvReg it sent to the DA, according to the multicast transmit
algorithm. The SA MUST only perform the multicast algorithm once,
even if it registers with more than one DA and receives the NotifyAt
in reply from more than one. Prior to its demise and after
deregistering with a DA, the SA MUST notify with the same SrvDereg,
as described in Section 7.2.
8. Multicast Address Allocation
Enterprise networks that allow SLP notification SHOULD deploy the
Multicast Address Allocation Architecture (MAAA) including
administratively scoped multicast and Multicast Address Dynamic
Client Allocation Protocol (MADCAP) [6].
If it is not possible to obtain a multicast address for use in SLP
notifications, the SLP multicast address is used.
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If the MAAA infrastructure is deployed, DAs and SAs obtain their
scope configuration from MADCAP, because the SLP scopes are the same
as the MADCAP scopes. Each SLP scope MUST correspond to a multicast
scope name, in the sense of [6]. In such a case, a DA allocates,
using MADCAP, a new multicast group address for each new service
type/scope pair to which a UA subscribes. The allocation is made by
MADCAP from the multicast address range for the scope. In this way,
only those UAs interested in the service type and scopes in the
subscription receive the multicast notification. The DA sets up the
lease on the multicast address to correspond with the duration of the
subscription. If the MADCAP server runs out of addresses, the SLP
multicast group is used as a last resort.
For example, if the multicast scope has an address range of 239.1.0.0
through 239.1.255.255, the notification group address for service
type X in scope A could be 239.1.0.42 and for service type Y in scope
B could be 239.1.42.42.
9. Multicast Transmit Algorithm
The DA and SAs use a multicast transmit algorithm similar to that
used for discovering services in SLP, described in RFC 2608 [1],
except the agent performing the notification doesn't wait for
replies. The agent performing the notification transmits a
notification message repeatedly over a period of 15 seconds, backing
off exponentially on the duration of the time interval between the
multicasts. The rationale for this algorithm is to limit the
duration and scope of the multicast announcement while still
repeating the announcement enough times to increase the probability
that one message gets through.
For an SA, a notification message is either a SrvReg or a SrvDereg
message, depending on whether the SA is registering a new service or
deregistering a service. When a new service is registered, the
SrvReg message MUST have the fresh bit set in the SLP header. The
entire list of attributes for the service SHOULD be included. The
SrvDereg message MUST NOT include an attribute tag list.
Notifications MUST NOT be transmitted at any other time, to minimize
multicast traffic.
Since a SrvReg could contain attribute lists of arbitrary length, the
message could potentially overflow the packet MTU for UDP. If an
attribute list causes a packet MTU overflow, the SA MUST set the
overflow bit in the SLP header. The attribute list in the
notification message MUST be formatted so that a UA can use the
attributes even if an overflow occurs. If a UA needs more attributes
than are transmitted in the notification message, it can contact the
SA (if no DA is present) or the DA for the attributes it needs.
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RFC 3082 Notification and Subscription for SLP March 2001
A DA multicasts a DAAdvert when a subscription comes in containing a
service type and scopes that do not match any on the DA's list of
known subscriptions. The same algorithm MUST be used. If the
combination of the DA attributes and the NotifyAt message cause the
DAAdvert to overflow a UDP packet, DA attributes MUST be truncated to
allow the NotifyAt to fit and the overflow bit MUST be set in the
header. An SA knows that the purpose of the message is to inform it
of a new subscription rather than for passive advertisement, because
of the extension, and it can therefore ignore the DA attribute list
field if the overflow bit is set in the header. A DA also transmits
a SrvDereg message when a service advertisement is deregistered due
to timeout, following the same rules as for an SA.
10.0 DA Disappearance
Robustness to DA failure is an important goal of the design. When a
DA disappears due to unforeseen circumstances, subscription
information from UAs is lost. UAs continue to get notifications from
existing SAs. However, new SAs will not be informed of the
subscription unless other DAs also have the subscription information.
Because a UA may not discover a new DA until it tries to perform an
active request, the UA could potentially miss the appearance of new
services. For this reason, UAs that are concerned about receiving
notification of absolutely every service that appears SHOULD issue
subscriptions to every newly discovered DA that supports the scopes
it supports. Similarly, if a DA disappears through controlled
shutdown, a UA performing passive discovery can detect the shutdown
and reissue the subscription to an alternate DA.
On the SA side, when a DA goes down, existing SAs continue to notify
until the subscription expires. Before ceasing to notify, an SA MUST
determine whether the DA is still active and, if not, verify with
another DA whether the subscription has been extended. If no other
DA is available, the SA MUST ignore the subscription expiration time
and continue notifying until a new DA is discovered. When a new DA
is discovered the SA must send a new SrvReg to the DA, according to
RFC 2608 [1]. The replying SrvAck contains a NotifyAt extension if
the UA has renewed its subscription with the DA. If the SrvAck does
not contain a NotifyAt message the SA MUST continue to notify until
the subscription expires. If a UA is interested in continuing the
notification, it renews the subscription with the new DA prior to the
expiration of the old one, and so the SA is informed to continue
notifying.
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Note that this procedure still does not inform SAs that come up
between the time a newly booted DA comes up and the time the UA has
renewed its subscription with the newly booted DA. If this situation
is of concern, multiple DAs can be used to assure that all
subscriptions are covered when a DA goes down.
11. Network Administration Considerations
In SLP networks with DAs as described in RFC 2608, the only multicast
is the SrvRqst for DAAdverts performed during active DA discovery,
and unsolicited DAAdverts sent periodically by the DA for passive
discovery. There is no multicast involved in UA queries or SA
registrations. This allows network administrators to set up DAs for
a particular collection of IP subnets and confine all service
discovery traffic to unicast between the SA and UA clients and the
DA. Administratively scoped multicast can additionally be used to
limit the extent of active DA discovery and passive DA advertising.
The amount of multicast involved is not high and DHCP DA and scope
configuration can be used to limit which DAs a particular UA or SA
client sees, or to inhibit multicast entirely so that UAs and SAs
only use configured DAs.
With notification, however, multicast traffic involving events in SAs
becomes available. Because DAs request multicast addresses based on
scope and service type, the multicast associated with particular
events should only propagate to those subnets in which UAs and SAs of
the same scope are interacting. Routers should be configured with
administrative multicast scoping to limit multicast. If DAs are not
deployed (or the MAAA is not deployed), however, the amount of
multicast on the SLP multicast address when notifications are being
used could quickly become very large. Therefore, it is crucial that
DAs supporting notification be deployed in large networks where UA
clients are interested in notification.
12. Security Considerations
The SrvReg and SrvDereg messages contain authentication blocks for
all SLP SPIs supported by the DAs with which the SA registers. Since
these SPIs are necessarily the same as those that UAs can verify, a
UA receiving a multicast notification is in a position to verify the
notification. It does so by selecting the authentication block or
blocks that it can verify. If authentication fails, either due to
lack of an authentication block, or lack of the proper SPI, the UA
simply discards the notification. In a network without DAs, the SPIs
of the UA and SA must also match.
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13. IANA Considerations
The SLP Notification services use the IANA-assigned port number of
1847. The SLP extension identifiers assigned by IANA are 0x0004 for
Subscribe and 0x0005 for NotifyAt.
14. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Charles Perkins, of Nokia, and Erik
Guttman and Jonathan Wood, of Sun Microsystems, for their stimulating
discussion and suggestions during the initial phases of the
subscription/notification design. We would also like to thank Erik
for his intense scrutiny of the specification during the later
phases. His comments were instrumental in refining the design.
Shivaun Albright, of HP, motivated simplification of the protocol to
focus on initial registration and deregistration only. Vaishali
Mithbaokar implemented the simplified protocol.
15. References
[1] Guttman, E., Perkins, C., Veizades, J. and M. Day, "Service
Location Protocol", RFC 2608, July 1999.
[2] Bradner, S., "Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[3] Guttman, E., Perkins, C. and J. Kempf, "Service Templates and
service: Schemes", RFC 2609, July 1999.
[4] Meyer, D., "Administratively Scoped IP Multicast", RFC 2365, July
1998.
[5] Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", RFC 2234, November 1997.
[6] Hanna, S., Patel,B. and M. Shah, "Multicast Address Dynamic
Client Allocation Protocol (MADCAP)", RFC 2730, December 1999.
[7] http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/multicast-addresses
[8] Guttman, E., "Service Location Protocol Modifications for IPv6",
Work in Progress.
[9] Hinden, R. and S. Deering, "IP Version 6 Addressing
Architecture", RFC 2375, July 1997.
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16. Author's Addresses
James Kempf
Sun Microsystems
UMPK15-214
901 San Antonio Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 94040
USA
Phone: +1 650 786 5890
EMail: james.kempf@sun.com
Jason Goldschmidt
Sun Microsystems
UMPK17-202
901 San Antonio Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 94040
USA
Phone: +1 650 786 3502
EMail: jason.goldschmidt@sun.com
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Full Copyright Statement
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Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
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