RIPE 30

Local IR Working Group
Ripe 30 - Stockholm (18 - 20 May 1998)

Chairman: Mike Norris
Date: Tuesday 19 May 1998
Time: 11'00 am
Minutes taker: simply Pepa

Going through the agenda points now:

1. Admin (scribe and agenda) sorted in one minute.

2. RIPE 29

A misunderstanding led to the lost of the Ripe 29 Local IR WG minutes :-(
If any action from that meeting ... nothing was mentioned or remembered.

3. Reports from registries

3.a. Ripe NCC

Paula Caslav gave a presentation about the Registration Services Department.

The Ripe NCC has been internally re-structured over the recent weeks,
as a consequence for the RS Department, Paula Caslav is now the manager
and Mirjam is the Director of External Services.

Paula's presentation can be found at:

ftp.ripe.net/ripe/presentations

As a brief abstract she showed an Internet growth chart. The
host count is done monthly and there are up to 6 millions hosts. The
'approx' number of LIR's is up to 900, the growth is about 1 new LIR
per day, wooow!!!! that's *amazing* and that's one of the reasons for
the Ripe NCC to sometimes be a 'bit too much beaurocratic' and the
necessity for applying the same rules in a fair and neutralised manner
was stressed.

Concerning the staff in the Department, 2 new hm's have been employed
and have been working within the department for a few weeks now.
There is a total number of 8 full time hosties and 2 new hosties will
start in July.

Some statistics in tickets were presented.
- Over 3000 tickets were opened this year. 'Approx' 700 per month.
- Categories:

PA requests: 2000 tickets
First request from a LIR: 100 tickets
Additional allocation: 100 tickets
PI requests: 20 tickets (this is good news :-)
AS numbers requests: 200 tickets
Static/vwww 16 tickets

Regarding workload Paula talked about a new distribution robot.
From now onwards requests sent to will be
checked by a robot and ticketised. If many mistakes are found
an error report will be sent back.

If LIR's want to bypass the robot, NOAUTO should be included in the
subject line.

If the request is for an additional allocation, LIR's should put
NEWBLOCK in the subject line. This kind of requests will be given
priority.

- The setting up of a LIR will be dealt within the RS department and
not in the ADmin Dept. as before.
The document Ripe-160 describes the steps for becoming a LIR.

- New developments on announcements.
Two drafts can be read about it.
Basically there will be some verification/authorisation on who can
make route announcements.

- LIR courses:

Right now Ripe NCC offers 2 courses per month.
2 new trainers have joined the team.
The list of future courses was showed.

- Plans & promises:

One of the current hostmasters will provide technical support for RS Dept.

A research will be done to find out the most common problems that
LIR's encounter. After that documents and courses will be implemented
to solve this.

A professional trainer will be hired shortly.

One of the current hostmasters will be dedicated to DNS.

The Auditing Depart. will be extended with some extra help.

A question raised at this point about what happenes to
tickets when the hosties dealing with them were suddenly off sick or
away in the middle of the process.

Paula answered immediately and accurately saying that messages are
distributed within working teams and this is dealt within the team.

Mike suggested at this point that it might be a good idea for the Ripe
NCC to write a document or put some information on the web about how
interacting with the new brand robot that was mentioned above.

****** Action on Ripe NCC: document on the web site information about
the distribution robot.

3.b REPORT FROM APNIC

Staff from APNIC were very busy, sent their apologies and a
presentation so Mirjam went through the APNIC slides.

They should be available at the same ftp site as the others.

Basically they are looking for a Director General, if anyone
interested please do send your CV.

APNIC is implementing their ticketing system which is kind of similar
to the one in the Ripe NCC with a graphical interface.

Also the charging scheme has been changed being now similar to the
Ripe NCC.

From now onwards will do reverse delegation of the Ip addresses assigned.

Priorities: find a director, set up core activities, software
development, write documentation about external and internal services
and also start doing training courses.

No questions were asked here.

REPORT

3.c FROM ARIN

Kim H. gave a short talk about ARIN.

ARIN opened offices in Dec. 22 1997.
Right now there are 7 employees.
5 member trustees.
15 members in the advisory council.
120 members. Membership is optional and not compulsory to get Ip addresses.
1 advisory councillor.

Kim also mentioned some software implementations, migrating the DB,
classless requests and information available on the web site for
requests.

Kim and her colleague Down will visit the Ripe NCC after the Ripe
meeting to talk about how to better coordinate and communicate among
the Regional Registries... after all communication is one of the most
important things to reach good understanding.

4. IP address space assignment

4.a A particular LIR requested an aggregation point on the agenda. As
everyone knows the size of the first allocation for a LIR is always a
/19 and the biggest is a /16.

A LIR suggested that it might be a good idea to be able to obtain a
/15 allocation for aggregational purposes.

Mike asked if more LIR's had the same demand/problems.

Paula said that the possibility of changing the criteria to obtain an
additional allocation from 90% to 75 or 80% was being discussed.

Other guy suggested that maybe 2 rules should be applied, depending on
the growth to the registries.

***** Action on Ripe NCC revise this and come up with a proposal for
***** the next Ripe meeting.

4.c Consistency and auditing

Paula presented some slides on this issue. The goal
is to ensure that LIR's follow the polices and address space is
distributed in a fair manner.

There is a document describing Auditing operation in Ripe-170.

LIR auditing is based on different criteria (see slides).

When problems are encountered with LIR's we try to:

- Discuss it with the LIR
- AW can be lowered implying that we will start seeing their requests
- Withhold future allocations giving LIR smaller allocations
- Close LIR's. It hasn't happened yet.

No questions asked so far.

Origin of audits:
- Hosties dealing with a request for additional allocation.
- LIR with AW = /19 for a long time
- New LIR's usually are not a problem since we see all the requests
from them. The only problem would be the start of new staff.

Conclusions: get some statistics on hm's researches and more general
audits to improve documentation and educate LIR's either with "web
interface", improve LIR courses.

Joaquim expressed his surprised about closing registries because the
mails and faxes sent from Ripe NCC bounced constantly. Paula said :
what else? if mails and faxes keep bouncing it means they out of
business.

Someone else asked whether we are checking the routing announcements
and the answer is Yes, Ripe NCC will do that.

- IPv6 address allocation (Bob Hinden)

Bob talked about IPv6.
First and introduction was done.
There is a new draft available at;


Types: Unicast, Multicast, Anycast.

Bob talked about prefixes, format, fields names (FP, TLA, ID RES, NLA,
ID SLA, ID Interface ID: required to be unique in a way, aggregation.

Some assignments rules were proposed: assignments should be done to
capable ppl. like transit providers, assignment policy should match
with the current policy, information should be provided to Registries
and assignments should be consistent.

A proposal was made to create a subfield sub TLA with 13 bits
Further assignments should be done when 90% of sub-TLA used up.

Some rules:
- Plan to offer IPv6 within 9 months
- Keep track of assignments.

5. IP registry hierarchy.

Some LIR's assign address space to ISP's that subassigne it to their
end-users. When should these ISP's become LIR's? This hierarchy
should be recognised however 'real' LIR's should always report to the
Regional Registry, abide by the Ripe-159 rules and be responsible for
their allocation.

6. Role of LIR WG.

Mike announced the need for a new chair for the the Working Group.

Also expressed the necessesity for some organisation in what this WG do.

With respect to the Hostcount project it was requested to extend it
and include a count for SOAs, too.

***** Action on Ripe NCC: Include count for SOAs.