The seventh South East Europe/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting (SEE 7) took place from 18-19 June 2018, at Hotel Timisoara in Timisoara, Romania. A total of 115 people from 15 countries attended the meeting, with an additional 130 people joining in remotely. The meeting was hosted by the RIPE NCC and InterLAN and was sponsored by VIVA Telecom.
The opening plenary included an introductory address by Axel Pawlik, RIPE NCC Managing Director, and was followed by a country report on Romania from the RIPE NCC’s Christian Teuschel. Christian was asked by Florian Dragomir if he had considered adding mobile data to his analysis to add an extra dimension, while Jan Zorz recommended including routing information. Eric Andrei Baleanu also shared that he was a RIPE Atlas ambassador and invited those interested in learning more about the probes to speak with himself and Christian.
The second panel of the day was on routing and infrastructure. Paolo Lucente of NTT Communications gave a very well-received talk on BGP monitoring, which incited a lively discussion, both after his presentation and over the course of the meeting. Krzysztof Grzegorz Szarkowicz of Juniper Networks spoke on two topics – Better IP Multicast Internet Architecture Brewing (BIER) and Routing in FAT Trees (RIFT). A talk on the IXP Paradigm Shift by Zoran Perovic of the Serbian Open eXchange set off another interesting discussion. Massimiliano Stucchi of the RIPE NCC asked Zoran whether he felt that Large BGP Communities were essential to enable IXPs to go global, while Arnold Nipper asked what Large Communities had to do with network control. Nenad Karjnovic of SOX answered saying that Large BGP Communities made multiple routes available and one had more control to choose the best or shortest path, making better routing decisions, allowing for better quality of service for the end user.
The lightning talks included an introduction to Peering DB, the work to create an IXP in Macedonia and an update on the RIPE Networking App, which was being used for a SEE Meeting for the first time.
The first day of SEE 7 was wrapped up with a BoF session (Birds of a Feather) on whether the ENOG and SEE meetings should be combined to create a joint meeting in Moldova in 2019. There was an open discussion on this proposal, which was ultimately inconclusive during the span of the session.
A plenary session on IXPs marked the start of the second day of SEE 7. Rebecca Class-Peter provided an update on Euro-IX, IXPDB and tools used. Thomas Weible of Flexoptix gave a talk titled “The Road to 400G over the next 12 months”. The last talk of the IXP plenary was on the “Implementation of MANRS in the IXP Network” by Goran Slavic of the Serbian Open eXchange.
The next plenary on IPv6 and infrastructure began with an overview of IPv6 adoption in the SEE region by Massimiliano Stucchi of the RIPE NCC. This was followed by a presentation by Jan Zorz of the Internet Society, titled “RIPE-690: IPv6 Prefix Assignment for the End User”.
There was a second plenary session on IXPs post lunch. Cristian Copcea of InterLAN Internet Exchange gave an interesting talk on TVX, a television exchange point and the TVX Management platform. This talk was followed by a presentation by Mariglen Hysko of RASH on the university data centre and network. Daniele Arena of NaMeX and Kledi Andoni spoke about their efforts to establish ANIX, the Albanian Neutral Internet Exchange.
The final plenary session of the second and final day of SEE 7 covered policy and security issues. Maria Stafyla, legal counsel at the RIPE NCC, spoke about the implications of the GDPR for the RIPE NCC and how it worked towards compliance. Her talk was well-received, with questions from the audience about whether GDPR was more scare-mongering because of the large fines involved, and Dimitry Kohmanyuk asked if smaller companies received any exemptions in case of violations. Maria said that there were provisions for companies below a certain size, but the essential thing for any company to do regardless of size was to first understand how much data they held and then whether they actually needed all of it for their core functioning. Kevin Meynell of the Internet Society gave a presentation on the security concerns with regard to the Internet of Things (IoT). Marco Schmidt, Policy Development Officer of the RIPE NCC, gave an overview of the Policy Development Process (PDP) within the RIPE community, which is supported by the RIPE NCC.
Three lightning talks brought day two of the meeting to a close. Gergana Petrova, RIPE NCC, gave a brief overview of the kinds of funding available through the RIPE NCC, including the RIPE Academic Cooperation Initiative (RACI), the RIPE Fellowship and the RIPE Community Development Fund. She urged attendees to reach out to universities and academics in their networks and encourage them to participate in RACI, adding that greater participation from the SEE region was very welcome. Remco van Mook, Asteroid / RIPE NCC Executive Board member, gave a talk on Papageno, more details of which are also available on Github. Razvan Oprea, RIPE NCC, spoke about the complexities of the technical setup and coordination that went on behind the scenes at RIPE Meetings.
The SEE 7 ended with a farewell address from Serge Radovcic. Serge thanked the sponsors and the programme committee. He invited feedback from all the attendees and asked the audience to participate at RIPE 77 in Amsterdam, either in person or remotely.
The meeting presentations were given in English. The presentations are available in the presentation archive. Videos of the presentations are available on the South East Europe Regional Meeting YouTube channel.
The SEE 8/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting will take place in April 2019.