Routing WG Minutes - RIPE 27, Dublin

[Anne Lord <]

Dear All,

Below are the draft minutes for the Routing WG Meeting in Dublin as compiled
and agreed by Joachim and myself.  Any comments, questins etc are gratefully 
recieved and should be sent to the list.

Many thanks,

Anne
--

RIPE 27    : Routing WG Draft Minutes
Chair      : Joachim Schmitz (JS395-RIPE)
Scribe     : Anne Lord (AL12-RIPE)
Attenders  : 57

1. Preliminaries

   Joachim Schmitz opened the working group and asked for a volunteer
   scribe. Anne Lord volunteered as scribe.

   Review of RIPE 26 minutes 

   The minutes of the last working group had been previously circulated 
   to the mailing list.  These minutes were agreed as final and closed.

   Review of actions RIPE 26 

   Action 22.10 : J. Schmitz 
     Future tool development project -  closed.
     (was discussed during the working group meeting itself)

   Action 25.R1 : D.Karrenberg 
     Route aggregation analysis - open.  

     Due to lack of time this has not been progressed. Volunteers to run
     scripts or do further development were asked for - they should
     contact Daniel Karrenberg. The present tool does slightly more than
     Tony Bates' aggregation report which looks at announcements being
     made. Daniel's tool actually emails originators with a "how to fix"
     mail.

   Action 26.R1 : RIPE NCC
     Add link to CIDR FAQ on RIPE web server - done.

   Action 26.R2 : J. Schmitz 
     Trigger implementation of first elements of hierarchical authorisation
     for route objects - done.

   Action 26.R3 : J. Schmitz
     Finalise hierarchical authorisation for route objects - ongoing.

   Action 26.R4 : E.J. Bos
     Circulate URL of his analysis of routing table size - done.
     (ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/surfnet/net-management/ip/nets.ps)

   Action 26.R5 : C. Panigl
     Collect reasonable route flap dampening parameter values - done. 
     (was discussed during the working group meeting itself)

   Current developments
   
   Joachim reported briefly 2 working groups within the IETF that
   are relevant to the work of the Routing WG.

   * RPS  - Routing Policy Systems

     Chairs are : Daniel Karrenberg and Cengiz Alaettinoglu
     http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/rps-charter.html

     The RPS working group wants to develop and propagate tools and
     methods to analyse and describe routing policies. One major project
     is RPSL "routing policy specification language". This is relevant
     for the Routing WG because they plan to switch from ripe-181 format
     for the routing registry to RPSL this year. The second version of
     an Internet draft on RPSL is already available.

   * RIDE - Registry Information Data Exchange

     Chairs are : David Kessens and Dhaval Shah

     This group is looking at ways of exchanging information between 
     registries of all sorts in a unified "language". See URL for more
     information: http://www.isi.edu/~davidk/ride

2. Hierarchical Authorisation / Cross Notification of Route Objects
   in the IRR (Carol Orange)

2.1 Cross Notification

   A draft proposal was sent to the Database and Routing WG mailing lists
   in May. The proposal is essentially to make network operators aware of
   overlapping route announcements in the IRR.  

   Implementation is by a new attribute in the route object called
   "x-notify". Using this attribute you will get notified if you submit
   a route object which overlaps an existing route object in the IRR or
   if another route object is submitted which overlaps your route object.
   Note - this will be an *optional* attribute.  

   The exact syntax is documented in the draft sent to the mailing list
   and can be found in the mailing list archives at:
   ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/archives/routing-wg/current. There were also
   some additions from the Database WG. An overview of the current state
   is given in the Working Documents section of the Routing WG on the RIPE
   web server: http://www.ripe.net/wg/routing/rwg-docs.html

   Discussion

   It was envisaged that given the way that the current IRR is mirrored
   (once every 24 hours), there will be delay in notification.  Real
   time mirroring would be ideal and the software exists.  However this
   has not yet been fully implemented as this still requires input from
   other RR's.  Gerald Winters from Merit (representing the RADB)
   commented that the current mirroring has been changed to mirror more
   frequently. 

   It was asked if there was a way to differentiate between exact matches 
   and overlaps? It was commented that this could be built in to the 
   software notification.

   A question was then raised as to the exact notification that takes
   place when an overlap/exact match occurs and as to the timing of the
   possibilites for notifcation and to whom. Do you for example,
   also notify the originator of the overlap? Should the software return 
   a warning to the originator of overlap even without the "x-notify"
   attribute ? 

   After a fairly lengthy and interesting discussion, it was agreed to go
   ahead with implementing the draft proposal given the following
   modifications which were agreed:

   - the submitter of the route will always be notified as to whether the
     object submitted was successful. Notification of overlaps can be built
     into the acceptance/feedback message returned to the submitter.

   - for deleting a conflicting object, it was agreed to notify the 
     submitter of the conflicting object that there was no longer a
     conflict in the database

   - notifications on overlap - either for newly submitted route objects,
     or for deletions - will only be done for *existing* route objects if
     explicitly requested by the "x-notify" attribute

   Action 27.R1: Carol Orange, RIPE NCC 
     To implement cross notification in the RR with modifications as
     agreed at the meeting of the 27th RIPE Routing WG.

2.2 Hierarchical authorisation in the RR (Carole Orange)
    (or "aut-num authorisation for route objects in the RR")

   The proposal is documented in a draft document which was previously 
   circulated to the Database WG and Routing WG mailing lists. Agreement
   on this proposal is now sought so that it can be implemented. 

   The goal of the proposal is to allow network operators who announce a 
   route in their AS to delegate this authority to others. There has been 
   much discussion on the mailing lists and a specific "non-goal" of the
   proposal is to produce an optimal hierarchical authorisation scheme 
   for the RR. This proposal is not CIDR based; hence the change of name
   for the draft to avoid any confusion about CIDR based hierarchy in the
   proposal to "Aut-num authorisation for route objects in the RR". 

   The proposal works briefly by the following mechanism:

   A "mnt-route" attribute (in former drafts called "mnt-lower") is added
   to the aut-num object. Currently the "mntner" object referenced
   determines who can add/update/delete an object associated with that
   aut-num (for more details see the draft which can be found at the
   reference above in the archives of the mailing list, or look at the
   Working Documents section of the Routing WG at the RIPE web server).

   The "mnt-route" attribute is optional and can be multiple per aut-num
   object. Each mnt-route attribute references it's own "mntner" object.
   This allows different people to maintain own routes announced.  

   Action 27.R2: Carole Orange, RIPE NCC
     To implement aut-num authorisation in the RR 

   There was some discussion over the notification mechanisms when customers
   change their announcements in their AS - so as to enable notification to 
   their upstream provider. This is actually a different issue and the
   discussion was deferred to the mailing list due to time constraints.

3. A future tool development project (Joachim Schmitz)
   ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/presentations/ripe-m27-jschmitz-ftdp.html

   Joachim briefly described some of the existing tool sets in place to
   help network operators with their network operations and asked whether
   there was a need for such a new development effort in this area to 
   be carried out under the auspices of RIPE and if so, where would it
   fit into the RIPE activity plan. Possibly, such a project could fit
   into the slot for "new activities" taken from the 1997 expenditures
   budget.

   As background to this Joachim gave a description of the history (ish) 
   and the functioning of the existing tools as well as the interaction 
   with the relevant entities. ie. routers.. ISPs, IRR.... etc.  Some of
   the tools he made mention of were the PRIDE tools eg. prtraceroute,
   prcheck, or the RATools eg. roe, aoe, peval, CIDR advisor.. 

   The question was then asked: Is a new tool or software project needed ?
   What gaps exist in the existing toolsets? 

   It was felt generally by the audience that the orientation should be 
   more towards actual integrity of the data in the RIPE database, quality 
   and consistency of the DB rather than towards new tools.

   Therefore, this action could be closed.

4. Report from the RIPE NCC

   Time contraints prevented NCC from doing CIDR report and route aggregation
   analysis that had previously been started. However new technical projects
   are ongoing and they are going to hire more people to do technical
   projects.

   The RIPE NCC welcomes any volunteers who wish to take over the production
   of the route aggregation analysis reports. Currently the reports are
   rather manually produced - mostly so in the generation of the "how to 
   fix" emails which go out to the originators of "problems". Daniel 
   repeated that he was quite willing to hand over the scripts if anyone 
   wished to work on this since there are currently no spare human resources 
   at the NCC at this point in time. There were no volunteers immediately.

   It was agreed however that these reports were very useful and perhaps it
   would be possible to at least publish a summarised report and not send the
   "how to fix" emails.  Reports will be sent out to the RIPE working group 
   mailing list. Since Tony Bates' report on route aggregation also contains
   information on European ASs it was agreed to ask him whether a copy of his
   report is also distributed to the general RIPE mailing list.

   Action 27.R3: RIPE NCC
     To ask Tony Bates to send a copy of his regular CIDR report to the
     general RIPE mailing list as well.

5. Route Flap Dampening Parameters (Christian Panigl)

   C. Panigl started with a summary of the BOF at the last RIPE meeting.
   Consensus was that we needed route flap dampening, but there was no
   consensus on dampening parameters: 2 camps had previously emerged:

   - Those in favour of "progressive" dampening with the exclusion of
     "golden" networks ie. root name servers..

   - or "flat and gentle" where all prefixes are treated equally a la
     Cisco default dampening.

   As an action from the previous Routing WG meeting, Christian Panigl
   presented information he had collected about dampening parameters. As
   a basis for his studies, he took information about dampening parameters
   from the following sources:  

   - discussions by Randy Bush a la SPRINT/ICM parameters 
   - Tony Barbers presentation on progressive route flap dampening at 
     UUNET UK. 

   Christian reported on the work by Sean Donelan sean@localhost who 
   made investigations.. comparing /24 prefixes and /16 prefixes:

   /24: 65% of Routing Table accounts for 65% of all route flaps
   /16: 12% of Routing Table accounts for 10% of all route flaps

   Both groups tend to flap ~2% of the routes within the group.

   What is the goal of flap dampening: stable routes or shorter prefixes?
   It was suggested that softer "punishment" of shorter prefixes might 
   lead to future waste of address space.

   Some router cpu offload has happened with progressive dampening.
   Excessive BGP withdrawal problem seems to be fixed in IOS 11.1(8)
   for Cisco routers.

   The assumption that the /24 is more unstable is not necessarily true
   given the following situation:

   example: reload after s/w uprade - 1x flap
            new s/w crashes         - 1x flap
            reload with old s/w     - 1x flap = 3x flaps within 10 minutes

   Then according to Randy's parameters /24 prefixes were blocked for
   3.5 hours.., /22 45 minutes, /19 45 minutes, /16 less than 30 minutes.
   According to Tony's paramters /24 prefixes were blocked for 2hrs 45mins, 
   /22 55 minutes, /19 55 minutes /16 less than 30 minutes.

   It was suggested that suppression should not start until the 4th flap in
   a row which corresponds to parameter value suppress = 3000 and that the
   maximum suppression should not last longer than 1hour (max supress <60).

   It was agreed that a recommendation from RIPE would be desirable.
   Given that the current allocation policies are expected to hold for 
   the foreseeable future, it was suggested that all /19's or shorter
   prefixes are not penalised outside of the Cisco default dampening.

   Action 27.R4: Task Force (Tony Barber, Sean Doran, Daniel Karrenberg 
              and Christian Panigl).
   To write proposal document and circulate to the RIPE rounting working
   group mailing list for discussion as soon as possible.

6. Reports from other WGs

   There was no current input from other WGs.

7. AOB

   Since there was no AOB the meeting was closed.


Agenda
------

 R I P E    2 7    D U B L I N
 Routing Working Group Session
 21-May-97        Draft Agenda

 A. Preliminaries
    - introduction
    - participants' list
    - volunteering of scribe
    - agenda bashing
    - RIPE 26 minutes
    - actions from earlier meetings
    - current developments

 B. Hierarchical Authorisation/Notification of Route Objects
    - first implementation issues (Carol Orange)
    - further developments (Joachim Schmitz)
    - discussion

 C. A Future Tool Development Project (Joachim Schmitz)
    - an overview
    - discussion

 D. Report from the RIPE NCC (Daniel Karrenberg)

 E. Route Flap Dampening Parameters (Christian Panigl)
    - overview
    - suggested parameters

 Y. General Input from Other WGs

 Z. AOB


Summary of Actions:
-------------------

   Action 25.R1: D.Karrenberg 
     To report on the results from the route aggregation analysis on
     the next RIPE meeting

   Action 26.R3: J. Schmitz
     To finalize the hierarchical authorization for route objects
     together with the Routing WG

   Action 27.R1: Carol Orange, RIPE NCC 
     To implement cross notification in the RR with modifications as
     agreed at the meeting of the 27th RIPE Routing WG.

   Action 27.R2: Carole Orange, RIPE NCC
     To implement aut-num authorisation in the RR 

   Action 27.R3: RIPE NCC
     To ask Tony Bates to send a copy of his regular CIDR report to the
     general RIPE mailing list as well.

   Action 27.R4: Task Force (Tony Barber, Sean Doran, Daniel Karrenberg 
              and Christian Panigl).
     To write proposal document and circulate to the RIPE Routing WG
     mailing list for discussion as soon as possible.

Anne Lord, Joachim Schmitz, 6 June 1997.