I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment. Living by the age old theory that "this time it will be different", I started browsing around the IETF website last week. There's no "joining" the IETF, you just subscribe to mailing list, add content, and go to meetings. I've subscribed to IETF mailing lists in the past only to be deluged in e-mail. I got thousands of messages from the working groups discussing the next great version of ARP. :-) I tried the e-mail digests too, but that only lead to a few extremely long e-mails.

But this time was going to be different. While reading the "Tao of the IETF" I came across the "Internet Drafts" mailing list. This is a list that sends an e-mail for each Internet Draft (ID) that is submitted. IDs are how all RFCs start. Put very simply, people write-up their great ideas as IDs, working groups argue about them, it turns into an RFC. (As anyone who works with the IETF can now tell I am not an expert on this process.)

I figured the volume from this IETF e-mail distro would be light. Couple e-mails a week when someone submitted their great new idea for BGP version 10.0 (or whatever). It would be interesting to see the new ideas people have that may one day become an RFC.

OMG! There are a lot of people out there with great ideas. In 5 days since I subscribed there have been 209 Internet Drafts submitted. Yes, some may be the same ID, but a quick look shows most are unique.

There were many topics, but a lot on SIP and mobility. And SIP for mobility. And mobility for SIP. Anyways...

There were some interesting ones too:

- IP Multicast Fast Reroute Framework

- IANA Allocation Guidelines for TCP and UDP Port Numbers

- IS-IS Multi-Instance

- DHCP Location Area - using DHCP response from a client with GPS to report its location (cool).

- MPLS Traffic Engineering Soft Preemption

So, maybe I'll check back in a year to see if one of these 209 IDs becomes an actual RFC. But, for now, I'll just unsubscribe. ;-)