Extract from RARE/TERENA Annual Report 1994



RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Daniel Karrenberg

The RIPE Network Coordination Centre supports all 
Internet service providers in Europe. The NCC is 
funded by the European Internet service providers. 
RARE/TERENA provides the formal framework for the NCC.
In September 1994 RARE has set up the RIPE NCC Contributors 
Committee in order to ensure good representation of those 
funding NCC activities and to consolidate the funding of the NCC.

The main activities of the NCC concern European 
Internet coordination.The following graph shows the number of individual 
European hosts registered in the domain name system for 1993 and 1994. 



The NCC produces and publishes this count on a monthly basis. 
The European Internet still doubles in size roughly every year.

The most visible activity of the NCC is the regional 
Internet registry whose task is the assignment of Internet 
network layer address space to European enterprises. 
For this purpose, a distributed system has been set up. 
144 local registries operated by Internet service providers
assign address space locally. The NCC as a regional registry 
allocates address space to the local registries, supports them 
and ensures that address space assignment occurs in a fair 
and regular manner. The NCC also deals with requests for 
large amounts of address space and requests from enterprises 
for which no appropriate local registry exists.

The RIPE NCC maintains the RIPE network management database 
containing information about IP networks, DNS domains, 
Routing Policies and the appropriate contact persons. 
At the end of 1994, the database contained 63,490 objects. 
During the year, the Database answered slightly more than 2.2 million q
ueries and processed 23,203 update requests for 227,933 objects. 
During 1994, the database software has been re-designed and re-implemented 
to support classless IP addressing as well as routing registry functions. 
The software is now being used by routing registries worldwide.

The NCC also maintains the RIPE document store, 
which stores all RIPE documents and a host of related information. 
It is accessible by the classical Internet services, common 
resource discovery tools and from the public X.25 networks.

During 1994, the NCC has been operating slightly over budget. 
This is mainly due to the badly needed increase in staff at the 
end of the year. Staff increased from 3 FTE in Q1 to 4.5 in Q4. 
The staffing level is still not adequate to cope 
with the growth of the Internet and the increased responsibilities 
of the NCC. Further growth is expected and budgeted for 1995.

1994 NCC Expenditure (in kECU)

					Budget		Actual

Staff					160		180
Computing				20		22
Travel					30		20
Rent & Office				30		26
RARE Services				5		10
Recruitment				0		1	
Unforeseen				10		7
					___		___

					255		266
					___		___


During 1994, the project PRIDE (Policy-Based Routing Implementation 
and Deployment in Europe) has been carried out at the NCC under the 
RARE/TERENA Technical Programme.

Special projects are funded by interested parties separately from 
the NCC Core Services.

For a detailed description of the NCC activities, see the NCC 
activity plan and the reports published by the NCC. These and other 
related documents are available from the RIPE document store.