Draft minutes 7th EOF meeting
- Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 20:21:03 +0200
Hi,
please find below draft minutes for today's EOF meeting. I'll
give you all one week to comment on the contents and suggest
modifications before I forward a copy of this to the general RIPE
mailing list.
Regards,
- Håvard
-*- Text -*-
European Operators Forum
Minutes of the 7th EOF meeting Havard Eidnes
Held at KTH, Stockholm, Friday 14 July 1995 NORDUnet
14 Jul 1995 v1 (draft)
------------------------------
Attendees:
Peter Lothberg STUPI roll@localhost
Havard Eidnes NORDUnet he@localhost
Keith Mithcell PIPEX keith@localhost
Anders Lowinger SWIPnet lowis@localhost
Per Bilse EUnet bilse@localhost
Rudiger Volk Deutsche Telekom rv@localhost
Marc Pichon Transpac/RAIN picon@localhost
Eric Malmstrom Transpac Sweden eric.malmstrom@localhost
Magnus Risberg Transpac Sweden magnus@localhost
Willem van der Scheun SARA scheun@localhost
Francis Dupont INRIA Francis.Dupont@localhost
Wilfried Woeber VUCC/ACOnet woeber@localhost
Andrew Partan UUnet/Alternat asp@localhost
Daniel Karrenberg RIPE NCC dfk@localhost
Philip Bridge Unisource Switzerland bridge@localhost
Ola Johansson Unisource Sweden ola.johansson@localhost
Jan-Olof "Moon" Jemnemo Telia, Sweden moon@localhost
Tony Hain ESnet alh@localhost
Yakov Rekhter Cisco yakov@localhost
Elise Gerich Merit epg@localhost
------------------------------
1. Welcome
PL welcomed everyone to KTH.
2. Minute taker
HE was volunteered to take the minutes.
3. Agenda bashing
No noted additions to the agenda at this time. AOB is still on
the agenda.
4. Apologies
None received.
5. Previous minutes
Francis Dupont had noticed two typos in the attendance list. No
other comments, so the minutes were approved with these
corrections. The approved minutes will be re-circulated to the
EOF and the RIPE lists.
6. European update
Dante/EMPB
There was noone present who could officially speak for
Dante.
The contract for the EMPB network expires in October -95,
and Dante has during the spring had a call for tender out
and has chosen British Telecom (BT) as the supplier of the
follow-on network.
The major uncertainty centered around whether the BT-
provider follow-on network to EMPB would be a private
network to be provided to Dante administratively managed by
Dante or whether BT under the contract was free to add
commercial customers to their network.
Willem van der Scheun had got the impression that the model
would probably basically be the same as today, i.e. it
would remain a private network.
Per Bilse had gotten the opposite impression, i.e. that BT
could add other customers to the network if they might
choose to do so, i.e. a model more similar to the old ANS /
NSFnet model.
Noone was present who could confirm or deny any of these.
Theis item would probably be brought up during the IEPG
meeting on Sunday, where hopefully someone with
authoritative information would be present who could
clarify this issue.
EUnet
EUnet has continued to upgrade it's network. They now have
2 x E1 to the US, and only a single international 64kbit/s
circuit remains in Amsterdam (Portugal). There has been a
recent change in the management of EUnet. Other than that,
things are progressing more or less in the "buisness as
usual" direction.
EBONE
Mostly buisness as usual. There has been some recent
upgrades: there are now 3Mbit/s (1+2) Stockholm - Paris and
4Mbit/s (2x2) to Amsterdam. EBONE is looking towards
establishing an E3-based backbone.
PIPEX
Keith Mitchell presented an overview of the PIPEX network.
Details can be found at
http://www.pipex.net/network/connectivity.html
Of notable international and european significance is 3 x
T1 links to the US east coast, London-Stockholm at 256
kbit/s and London-Paris at 2x128 kbit/s. PIPEX is planning
on using VSAT in the eastern countries. They also have a
link London-Johannesburg, and as far as they know they are
the first ones to implement a European-African link. They
also have a planned link to Ghana. The UK-internal network
is now mostly 2 Mbit/s based.
The notable grief they have at the moment is that they
reach Dante customers and EUnet customers via the US.
NORDUnet
Havard Eidnes gave a brief update of NORDUnet's expansion
plans. The current intra-nordic network is based on
2Mbit/s lines with 2 lines going to Finland (except Iceland
which is at 256 kbit/s). The central nordic region will
approximately in October be operational with an 8 Mbit/s
star out of Stockholm to Oslo, Helsinki, and Copenhagen.
We have also asked for a price quote for an upgrade of the
line to Iceland to 1 Mbit/s. In Iceland there are some
organizational changes going on -- the former Suris
cooperative is being replaced by a new company called
"Internet Iceland" (IntIS for short) with basically the
same constituency as the old Suris cooperation but with a
more solid organization.
NORDUnet will subscribe to the new BT-operated Dante
network service at 2 Mbit/s. NORDUnet is in addition
thinking of implementing other international circuits in
cooperation with other networks.
RIPE NCC
The RIPE NCC is currently getting it's transit services
from SURFnet who use the Dante services. However, they
also peer with EUnet and EBONE, and are willing to peer
with anyone else showing up where the RIPE NCC is present.
Therefore, chritisism that the RIPE NCC does not have a
neutral position relative to service providers can now be
said to be laid to rest.
7. Ten34 impact on the non-R&D part of Europe
The two persons who had been contacted by PL were unable to give
a presentation. Thus, noone present could talk in authority
concerning the Ten34 initiative, so the following is based on
second-hand information:
In the 4th european research programme there will be funds
available for implementing some sort of high-speed networking
for R&D in Europe. This combined with the general need for a
better general intra-european infrastructure for R&D has spurred
the Ten34 initiative. The members of the Ten34 initiative are
the major R&D networks in Europe.
It should be mentioned that other parties are after the EU funds
as well, notably the "James" initiative which is largely
comprised of european PTTs who want to continue the current
ATM-based pilot network. The Ten34 constituency does not appear
to think that the James initiative contributes a workable
solution to the problem the R&D networks are facing (basically
because ATM is seen as "too early" technology-maturity-wise, and
what is needed is a production network).
The EU has indicated that co-funding of a 34 Mbit/s based
network could be forthcoming if offers for circuits at prices
equal to 4 times 2 Mbit/s would be forthcoming.
Should the Ten34 initiative be realized the network will have to
maintain an AUP (or at least restrictions on direct "customer"
connections) since it will receive public funds paying parts of
the cost (at least initially).
The concern raised by the group was how this would be integrated
into the rest of the existing and forthcoming Internet infra-
structure in Europe. Firstly, it is probably premature at this
stage to expect this detailed planning -- the rumours seemed to
indicate Ten34 to be between 12 and 24 months away if it would
be realized. The group then suggested a short recommendation
should be written expressing the issues to be taken into account
in this arena when planning the network.
ACTION: Keith Mitchell and Havard Eidnes to draft a document
highlighting the issues to be considered concerning the impact
of the Ten34 network on the general Internet in Europe.
8. Stockholm-US 34/45 Mbit/s service
Peter Lothberg gave a short presentation of the details of the
recently activated 34/45 Mbit/s service between Stockholm and
the US. The implementation work had taken approximately 24
days, and was somewhat complicated. Detailed pictures showing
the equipment and cable paths were shown.
PL is looking at getting backup of this circuit on the IP
level with another european country with a high-speed link.
9. NY/Pennsauken Euro-NAP
The 34/45 Mbit/s circuit terminates in the NY NAP facility in
Pennsauken (New Jersey). In order to make it possible for other
european service providers to connect to the US at high speeds
the circuit is not directly attached to the NY NAP switch but to
a separate FDDI LAN. PL expected another undisclosed european
party to connect to the NY NAP at E3 speed sometime in
September.
10. Connectint to the former USSR
Tony Hain of ESnet is planning two links into Russia near Moscow
at 64kbit/s via satellite to an european termnation point with
64kbit/s onwards to ESnet, and wanted to get some impression of
what others are doing wrt. networking into the former USSR. The
result was that the people present could inform of a number of
links going into different parts of the former USSR from
different service providers. The picture is dominated by a lot
of more or less un-coordinated efforts, which tends to leave one
left with a mildly chaotic impression. The solution recommended
for the time being would thus be "do it yourselves".
It was noted that RIPE has a working group collecting
information about connectivity into the eastern and central
european countries (the connectivity working group), they have a
number of documents stored in the RIPE document store at the
RIPE NCC, and the working group is still active. If any new
information surfaces, please submit it to the connectivity
working group for inclusion in the RIPE document store.
11. European interconnects -- status
LINX (London InterNet eXchange)
The LINX had the initial members:
Connected bandwidth
PIPEX 10 Mbit/s
JANET/UKERNA 18 Mbit/s
BTnet 2 -> 10 Mbit/s
EUnet/GB 512 kbit/s
Demon 2 Mbit/s
Recent requests and/or additions:
Netkonect, Sprint International, Technocom, INSnet,
CableTel.
There has been lots more growth in the number of providers
wishing to connect to the LINX than expected -- there comes
in a valid new request about once every 14 days. When it
was first set up there was no formal organization to handle
requests for new connections, this apparently needs to be
fixed.
Implementation-wise they have a Cisco Catalyst ethernet
switch at the moment. A second Catalyst and possibly an
FDDI ring would be added soon.
Other information about the LINX can be found at
http://www.linx.net/linx/
KM expressed his satisfaction with Telehouse as a
facilities manager: they're not an ISP with it's own agenda
in the Internet provider buisness and they are not a phone
company with the traditional mindset and restrictions that
implies.
F-GIX (France)
Noone from France Telecom or Renter were present, Mark
Pichon gave a short orientation.
There is currently an interconnect point in FT premises
where Renater, Oleane, and IN2P3 are connected.
Transpac/RAIN has tried to connect to the current exchange
point but a response to this request has been unexplicably
delayed.
There is a proposal for establishing a new exchange point
in Paris, however the location has not been decided yet
(will probably be decided at the end of the month).
Stockholm, D-GIX
Currently implemented with 2 Cisco Catalysts and an FDDI
ring with plans to add an FDDI switch. Metropolitan Fiber
Systems will connect to the exchange point in Stockholm
with a layer-2 connection, and will thus be able to extend
the geographical coverage of the exchange point to the
other POPs MFS has in Stockholm. (This is similar to what
they have done at the MAE-East and MAE-West exchange
points.)
Rule for connecting: must have peer agreement with at least
two of the others already present to connect.
Amsterdam
There is currently an initiative to add another exchange
point in Amsterdam in addition to "IBR-lan". Some of the
motivation for this move is to not have a single ISP be in
control of the exchange point.
Geneva
As noone present could talk authoritatively about the
Geneva exchange point the following is at best second-hand.
There was mention that at least part of the exchange point
at CERN would be moved to BT premises -- this is in
connection with the local implementation of the access
ports to the BT-operated EMPB follow-on service from Dante.
Whether this move includes the other parts of the CERN
exchange point was not clear.
Italy
There are 2 exchange points currently: one with local
co-location (in Milan?) and one using Frame Relay. There
has been little public information about these, DFK
commented that this may stem from their culture which
basically says "don't talk until your're ready".
Germany
There is or will be an exchange point between at least
three German service providers. The rules for connecting
to the exchange point are at best unclear, some parties
have been turned away with no explanation. There is also
an existing de-facto exchange point at the ECRC
installation. Ruediger Volk expressed his desire to press
for someone to establish an open exchange point somewhere
in Germany.
Finland
A message from Petri Ojala in EUnet/Finland had sent the
following message to PL:
FICIX (Finnish Commercial Internet Exchange)
- Operational since December 1993. National interconnect
point for finnish Internet service providers, current
members are EUnet Finland, FUNET, Datanet (Telecom
Finland), LanLink (Local PTT's Consortium) and Clinet
(since June 1995). EUnet Finland has been appointed to
manage the FICIX.
- FICIX operations has been smoothly and practically
trouble-free, currently BGP4 is used between all the
provider routers. The FICIX media is being upgraded from
shared ethernet to switched ethernet. FICIX members have
from 2 to 10 Mbit/s connectivity to their own backbones.
Norway
HE gave a short presentation. The NIX (Norwegian Internet
eXchange) has been in operation since the summer of 1993.
The NIX is housed at the University of Oslo, which is also
a Uninett POP (Uninett is the norwegian R&D network
organization). It currently connects Uninett, EUnet/NO,
TelePost, Oslonett, DAXnet, and PowerTech, with at least
one coming. The purpose is to contain norwegian traffic
inside Norway, one of the premises for connecting is that
one have Norway-external connectivity via other means than
at the NIX.
Ireland
There is a plan to set up an interconnect point and
establish a local Irish operator's forum. Contact: Mike
Norris.
12. Focus on three initial exchange points in Europe?
PL sketched the problem faced by international and inter-
continental Internet service providers who would want to
"connect to Europe". To make it possible for such service
providers to enter the scene the number of "top-level" Europan
exchange point should be limited. The idea is also partly to
create a market by defining the product.
DFK pointed out that this issue had been discussed before and
that it would probably be difficult to establish a consensus as
most service providers would like to have an european exchange
point "in their own backyard". Some objective criteria and
possibly metrics for choosing exchange points could be
developed, however, setting the threshold would again be
difficult.
After a short discussion it was agreed that as a first minimal
step today's system should be clearly and consistently
documented and e.g. stored in the RIPE document store.
ACTION: DFK to write up a proposal for a skeleton for describing
an exhange point.
ACTION: PL to write a recommendation or guidelines for
intercontinental service providers who want to connect their
networks in Europe.
13. EOF charter
The EOF charter has not really been formally approved yet. The
July 1994 version was presented together with requests for
additions or deletions from that round of comments (partly with
these comments merged into the document).
There were no comments to the modified charter. The new
modified charter is attached below.
14. Net-39 experiment
Moved to IEPG meeting on Sunday
15. MBONE & PIM experiments
Andrew Partan talked briefly about their experience in trying to
use native multicast on the Cisco routers. The basic goal for
this excersise is to only get one copy of a given multicast
packet on each link of their infrastructure. They have partly
tried to separate the unicast and multicast routing, and are
doing this by running DVMRP in addition to PIM to establish a
separate RPF lookup table (maintained by DVMRP). Currently the
service is CPU bounded on the Cisco routers since the multicast
routing and fowarding is process-switched in the Cisco 10.3 code
(11.0 will add fast-switching).
Yakov Rekhter asked whether a knob to control the CPU
consumption and/or bandwidth utilization on a given link caused
by multicast to be controlled; the general answer was "yes, this
would be useful" -- e.g. some parties already use the bandwidth-
limiting feature in mrouted and the corresponding kernel
multicast forwarding code.
One conclusion from this excercise is that the tools for
handling external multicast routing simply are not there yet.
16. Route flap damping
Cisco has lately (in a branch of 10.3) implemented Curtiz
Villamisar's proposed modifications to BGP to support dampening
route flapping on the Internet. The paper describing this can
be found in
ftp://ftp.ans.net/pub/papers/route-dampen.ps
Andrew Partan reported that Alternet has turned on the feature
("router bgp xxx", "bgp dampen"), and both the algorithm and the
implementation work. The net effect of this code is to slow the
propagation of changes for a given prefix if it has been
flapping, so any changes (transitions up or down) will take
longer to propagate to remote places. It was noted that there
is no "preferred state" for a route, so it can equally well be
held down as being kept up longer than earlier.
17. Scaling issues: how small can an ISP be?
Keith Mitchell reported his experiences in that several small
sites and/or service providers are buying cheap circuits to the
US and going to the LINX to be connected there. This happens
partly because of the disparity between the prices of
international circuits going to the US as compared to intra-
european circuits (again caused by the vast difference in the
telecommunications regulatory regimes on the two sides of the
Atlantic).
Common for lots of these small sites is also that they are
relatively uninformed of how to set up their service properly
with external routing etc., and the issue was raised about how
many such service providers the Internet could acommodate.
DFK commented that it would be difficult to do anything about
this situation without being accused of "restraint of trade" or
of anti-competitive practices.
The discussion on this and related points will continue at the
IEPG meeting on Sunday.
18. AOB
DFK asked about the "hall of fame" / "hall of shame" messages
sent out recently concerning use of CIDR, and asked how often
people would like to have them and for other suggestions for
improvements. It was agreed that the names of the ASes
injecting the prefixes should be named and that these should be
sent out monthly in connection with the host count statistics.
DFK asked about how many actively maintained the contents of the
RIPE routing registry, the response was "not very many". There
is currently no script to compare the actual BGP routing tables
with the contents of the routing registry contents.
19. Next meeting
The next RIPE meeting has been moved to October 11-13 (the dutch
minister of education pulled rank and got the usual RIPE meeting
room at NIKHEF), so the next EOF meeting would be held on the
11th in Amsterdam.
------------------------------
European Operators Forum Charter
Glenn Kowack et al.
Version 1.1
14 July 1995
Technical Mission
The mission of the European Operators Forum (EOF) is technical: to provide
a continuing environment in which European national and international
service providers may meet as a group to discuss operational issues. It
will also serve as the regional operators forum for Europe under the IEPG
umbrellar.
Open Membership
Membership in the European Operators Forum (EOF) is open to any person
representing a national or international provider of IP services in the
European region. As meetings will be very focused on the issues at hand,
persons with only educational interests should not attend. It is hoped
that all service providers will actively participate in the EOF.
Participating organizations are encouraged to send only a few
representatives to each meeting, and to maintain as much continuity of
representation as possible.
Open Process
The EOF does not formally create policies, standards, or requirements.
It's activities are limited to discussion and consensus building. All EOF
minutes and documents will be in the public record.
Organisation
As present there is no plan for a formal structure, secretariat, or dues,
save for the appointment of a Chairman. It is expected that support will
be provided by member organisations and the RIPE NCC. EOF meetings will be
held as required.
Relationship to RIPE and other Organisations
The EOF will work in cooperation with RIPE as a working group. In addition,
the EOF will act as the European part of the IEPG. It is critical that no
single organization or type of network service provider have undue
influence on EOF activities or directions.
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