I’m currently in Washington DC, attending the 61st IETF meeting.
For those who’s never been to an IETF meeting, think of it as a gathering of hundreds of internet geeks wandering in the conference hotel with laptops opened in front of them. IETF meetings occur 3 times a year, there are about 4 sessions per day, of 7 meetings in parallel running for 5 days from 9am until 10:30 pm for the latest. And many many corridor, bar, lunch discussions. (for the real curious I recommend reading the Tao of IETF)

My main focus is LDAP and the ldapbis working group, but I’m also following out of curiosity other working groups in the Application and the Security areas.

The ldapbis (ldapv3 revision) working group is about to conclude with the internet-drafts revising the LDAPv3 specifications going under final review before publication. The new drafts remove lots of the ambiguities of the existing RFC (RFC 2251-2256, 2829, 2830 and 3377), by citing explicitely the relevant parts of X.500. But one can say that LDAP is no longer lightweight. Anyway, the clarifications were necessary and we will be enforcing a stricter compliance to the specifications in coming releases of Sun Java System Directory Server.

The password policy for LDAP draft that I’m co-authoring was published late october and Jim and I spent some time together to work on the known issues and we should be pushing a revision pretty soon.