(Please send replies to grobj@xxxxxxxx) Today's applications usually exchange an IP address and a TCP (or UDP) port for referrals. While this works in a wide variety of situations, it has been shown insufficient with more complex networks that consist of different address realms (due to IPv4 NATs and IPv6 ULAs), different address families (IPv4 and IPv6) and new transport protocols (such as SCTP). Some applications have pursued their own mechanisms to extend their referral mechanism (e.g., draft-ietf-mmusic-ice). It is important to provide guidance to applications and network devices so that referrals can work between two applications. Such guidance is important today, and will be more important as networks become more complex with common deployments of host and network multi-homing, tunnels, VPNs, and address family translators. The mailing list GROBJ has been created to discuss Generic Referral Objects (GRO) for application referrals. Interested parties can join the mailing list at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/grobj Draft: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-behave-referral-object BoF proposal: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/GROBJ-BOF.txt -d _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf