# IETF tools update 2026-04 [Previous report](https://notes.ietf.org/tools-update-202603) | [Next report](#) ## The Big Picture ### IETF 125 We had a very smooth event from the tooling operations perspective. There were significantly fewer issues with accounts and access to the sessions than in previous meetings. We had two bursts of database failover occur, related to transient network issues inside the cloud provider. Almost all of our applications (datatracker, mailarchive, registration, www, etc.) were affected, and all performed as intended with a minimal disruption to the application users. We also encountered, particularly during the catalist session, large bursts of connections dropping and being re-established between meetecho’s servers in singapore and zulip in us-east. We will be looking into whether there would be any benefit to (and the difficulty of) placing zulip closer to the meetecho servers during the meetings. While diagnosing both of the above, we increased our visibility into the performance of the network paths between components and the peformance of the database nodes using both the cloud provider's tooling and our own Grafana instance. This will help us gain further insight should such conditions appear again in the future. ### RFC Production Center work We are primarily focusing on the RFC Production Center modernization tasks. As a reminder, this major project includes the following: * A new queue management workflow tool for the RPC fully integrated with the datatracker. This is the core RPC database and it replaces the existing database and software that cannot handle five-digit RFC numbers. * A complete reimplementation of www.rfc-editor.org. The backend is being replaced as part of the new queue management system from which it draws data, and the frontend is being replaced with a new design from our UI/UX specialist contractors that aims to significantly improve the experience for consumers of RFCs. The frontend is also built around the concept of pre-computation, and will be served almost entirely from the edge. * A new public site for authors and others tracking the editing of an RFC, with detailed information about documents in the queue. * Editing software for the RPC that now provides all the current functionality that the editors rely on in an integrated GUI, replacing the multiple command line scripts they previously worked with. This also integrates with GitHub and Datatracker, automating previously manual processes. * A new, more streamlined publication process for RFCs that leverages GitHub. * A reimplementation of the existing errata system into a new site that is integrated with the new www.rfc-editor.org and datatracker. * As part of this work, extensive work has gone into identifying and resolving differences in data between the RPC database and datatracker, leading to significantly improved data on authors and RFCs in Datatracker This needs to be completed before the first-five digit RFC enters the system, which is currently expected in June. We are finalizing development, and are building support for finishing, e.g., final review (auth48) of documents currently in that state. We are currently in the middle of a redeployment exercise to ensure the final production deploy goes as expected. The RPC is continuing to spot-check and will be inspecting the system for the next few weeks. Our current deployment target is the second week of May. ### IETF Tools roadmap Work on the roadmap has been set aside until we are through the RFC Production Center work. Work will resume after that has been deployed. No updates have been made to it since the last report. ### Other areas of work underway In addition, but at a lower priority, we are: * Refactoring datatracker and mailarchive to reduce the amount of on-the-fly generation and to keep generated/static artefacts in blob storage to improve the datatracker's resiliency and performance. * Stabilizing the existing mail system, addressing basic delivery issues, and building a more managable system to replace it. * Fixing issues and making minor changes to xml2rfc and other author tools. * Fixing issues and making minor changes and repairing data to/in datatracker * Reviewing and incorporating community provided PRs --- ## Possible new work We will be looking into how we can improve the way Meetecho uses the Zulip APIs. --- ## Deployment / Infrastructure Overview See the [Miro diagrams](https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJvo6ZCg=/?share_link_id=982919235526). ## ⌨️ Development Projects ### Datatracker The datatracker operated smoothly during IETF-125. The database cluster did experience several unexpected failover events that caused a small number of requests to result in 500 errors, but these occurred outside of the meeting time and recovered without incident. The root cause is not conclusively known but appears to be brief connectivity issues within the Kubernetes cluster. In response, we have improved our alerting when failovers occur and enabled database connection health checks for datatracker, which should eliminate most or all of the errors should this recur. The IETF-125 Code Sprint resulted in a number of pull requests with contributions from the community, including a first-time contributor on site in Shenzhen. Thank you to all who participated! We had a breakthrough during IETF125 diagnosing an issue with slide uploads that groups with multiple sessions, like MOQ, have encountered. The essence is that with the right preconditions, slides would only be uploaded to one session, and often the wrong one. We will be refactoring the slide upload path so that this is not possible going forward. Since the last IETF tools update (March 2026) there was one datatracker release (a patch release). See [the release page](https://github.com/ietf-tools/datatracker/releases) for release 12.60.1. The full set of changes is [here](https://github.com/ietf-tools/datatracker/compare/12.60.0...12.60.1). This release included: * fixed an access control issue that allowed users to cancel manual I-D posting requests Current activities: * Preparing a release with contributions from the IETF-125 Code Sprint! 🎉 * Development to support the RPC tools modernization project ### Author Tools _No changes since the last report._ ### XML2RFC _No changes since the last report._ Upcoming changes: * Generate a valid PDF/A-3U PDF and attach XML source to the PDF. See [1090](https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/pull/1090). * Change boilerplate text from **IETF Trust** to **IETF Intellectual Property Management Corporation (IPMC)** for v3. See [#1171](https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/issues/1171). * Remove `@derivedAnchor` & `@derivedCounter` anchors in **uprep** stage. See [#1194](https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/issues/1194). * Include `@anchor` in `contact` elements for HTML & PDF output. See [#1291](https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/issues/1291). ### BibXML Service There have been few outages since the last report and we have taken steps to address the abusive traffic via cloudflare. We are also looking at ways to improve the database connection related issues since that has been the root cause of the outage. We are developing a new BibXML front-end that take latest Relaton Data gems to generate BibXML files and serve them from cloud object storage with a [typesense](https://typesense.org/) search frontend. This project saw no significant changes since the last report. See the proposed [architecture diagram](https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJx7FoWU=/?focusWidget=3458764646532152564). * **NIST** data set is stale. See [relaton-data-nist#18](https://github.com/ietf-tools/relaton-data-nist/issues/18). * **IEEE** data set is stale. See [relaton-data-ieee#26](https://github.com/ietf-tools/relaton-data-ieee/issues/26). * **W3C** data set is stale. See [relaton-data-w3c#18](https://github.com/ietf-tools/relaton-data-w3c/issues/18). ### Wagtail websites (www.ietf.org, www.iab.org) _No changes since the last report._ ### idnits *No changes since last report.* ### Mailarchive There were two [release](https://github.com/ietf-tools/mailarchive/releases) since the last report. Work focused on: * adjust app settings to eliminate noise from logs * update all dependencies * continued work on blob storage support ### Registration There were seven releases since the last report. Work consisted of: * NOC API changes * implement charts as Apache ECharts * add 2 new meeting reports * improve EventRegistration admin search options * changes for IETF 127 (LOI and hero image) * better checks to prevent oversold events * add more detail to event registration transaction descriptions * minor improvements to registration form handling ### Retooling the RPC workflow ("Purple") #### General overview We are in the process of deploying to an environment that will mimic the production environment more closely than the current staging deployment. This will allow the RPC staff to do final acceptance tests in near-production conditions. #### Progress since last report: * auto-creation of clusters on submission of drafts and add drafts and normative references to it * bugfixes and refactoring on cluster graph display * improve handling of publication dependencies (search, add, delete) * add handling of author's affiliation * improve handling of assignments ### RFC Editor website ("Red") * The `/info/rfc*` routes now have errata * `/robots.txt` and `/sitemap.xml` files are now generated * `/rfc-index.xsd` is served * The `<meta>` tags across the site are now more like the existing site. * Google Scholar `<meta>` support added * RFCs now have custom thumbnail images * RSS/Atom feed order and generation time fixed. ### Queue pages * Work begun on `/queue.xml` feed. ### Errata system Mechanisms to signal that changes to errata.json were available to trigger necessary recomputation of pages at the rfc-editor website and in the datatracker were refined. ### RFC Editor dokuwikis There are three dokuwiki based sites in use by the RPC team. These have been converted to container versions running in Azure Kubernetes, and have now been modified to allow URL rewriting in preparation to cut over from the RPC editor host. Migration to happen over the next week. ### RFC Editor rsync and ftp services A replacement for the current rsync and ftp services required for use after the RPC tooling deployment is in final testing and may be deployed before the rest of the system is deployed. ### RPC Editor (DraftForge) The following features have been added to DraftForge since last update: - Added "Export As..." tool to export multiple formats at once. ### Side Meetings The new Side Meetings website was well received during the last meeting. ### Email systems * new Ansible to configure, and manage most aspects the new outbound relay host * New dashboard for postfix statistics highlightig non-deliverable errors, and flow timing in development * DANE management scripts implmenting a "current + next" 3 1 1 rollover regime, both for bare-metal, and kubernetes based mail systems * Migrated postconfirm v3 to aiosmtp, mitigating python GIL-based performance issues * New REST interface for the mail rewriting service, currently exposing health information but /metrics endpoint planned ### YANG Catalog _No changes since the last report._ --- ## Maintenance ### Django (unchanged since previous report) Multiple systems including Datatracker are built on Django 4.2 LTS which reaches EOL in April 2026. Work will need to begin soon on migrating to Django 5.2 LTS, which as the major version change suggests, is more than a simple change. Several deprecated features Datatracker relies on are removed in Django 5.2 In particular, Django 5.0 retired support for the deprecated pytz library which Datatracker uses fairly extensively. It also deprecates the CICharField which the datatracker uses extensively for storing email addresses. ### Debian image bases (unchanged since previous report) Most of our containerized applications rely on Debian, and require updates following the Debian lifecycles. The datatracker's base image is currently built on bookwork (12), but needs to move to trixie (13) to support changes to libyang/libyang3-tools that are not available on bookworm. We attempted to make this move at the end of 2025 but encountered a dependency issue that will need to be resolved before we proceed. ### Kubernetes Kubernetes releases are supported by Azure for 1 year. As we are reaching EOL soon for the currently deployed version (1.32), the clusters will need to be upgraded to the latest version (1.34). The upgrade will proceed in the next few weeks. We expect that we will be able to make this upgrade with no application downtime, but it will require managing the datatracker deployment in a configuration we have not used before.