1. draft minutes from the RIPE38 Routing WG session

R I P E  3 8   A M S T E R D A M
Routing  Working  Group  Session
24-Jan-2001        Draft Minutes

Chair:        Joachim Schmitz (JS395-RIPE)
Scribe:       Engin Gunduz
Participants: 97

A. Preliminaries (Joachim Schmitz)

  The chair man welcomed the participants, and distributed the participants'
  list to sign in. Engin Gunduz volunteered to take the minutes. The WG agenda
  was accepted without changes. The minutes of the previous meeting at RIPE37
  were accepted by the participants, and are thus declared final.


B. The Hermes Project (Giuseppe di Battista, University of Rome)
  [ The presentation will become available shortly at the RIPE web server ]

  URL: http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~hermes

  The idea of the Hermes project is the integration and visualisation of
  Routing Registries Information and BGP Routing Data. Consequently,
  major targets are to
    o explore the Internet interactions at AS level
    o visualise interactive maps
    o show inconsistencies
  Hermes is based upon a
    o 3-tier architecture
    o repository of routing information
    o mediator for the information integrity.
    o graph drawing module

  After presenting the general outline and functionality, Guiseppe showed
  a demo prerecorded with a screencam from a life example around AS137.
  This demo included
  - peering activities (neighbor ASs, and routes)
    supplemented with more info from the IRR database
  - in/out routing policies
  - paths to another AS
    with routes from that AS and description from the IRR
    supplemented by AS macros involvede, plus which ASs are part of them
  Another demo showed more details around routing policies, where the AS
  was initially selected by its name in the IRR
  - showing inconsistencies of registered policies of connected ASs

  The results can be viewed as text and in a graphical map.

  Guiseppe continued with more details on the internal structure of how
  Hermes works. In particular he described
  - three tier architecture
  - data integration
  - mediator for data processing
  - graph drawing around the difficulties introduced by locally sparse and
    extremely dense parts requiring complex algorithms

  Eventually, current and future work was summarized:
  - moving from RIPE-181 to RPSL format (March 2001)
  - adding new sources of information (RIS project?)
  - distinguishing between different sources of information (June 2001)
  - visualisation and animation of route flaps (June 2001) 
  - looking inside an AS: traceoute (June 2001)
  - looking inside an AS: OSPF (June 2001) 

  Finally, a brief distinction compared to other similar projects was given:
    o  skitter (Caida) [global view of Internet]
    o  ASExplorer (IPMA) [specific view of one single AS]
    o  Hermes [in between]

  In the brief following discussion, the impression was that Hermes is a
  useful tool, comprising information from different sources.

  Q (chair): It is not entirely obvious which data comes from which source.
    Is this shown in the tool?
  A: It should be relatively easy, and is actually planned.

  Q (Ping Lu): What are the means of output?
  A: So far, the data can only be printed. Since this is a Java applet,
     it is difficult to produce output in many formats and save them to
     local disk
   
  As final summary, Guiseppe stressed that he welcomes suggestions like this,
  and asked for any additional input to be sent to him and his group (contact
  details on the web page http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~hermes).


C. RIS Report (Henk Uijterwaal, Thomas Franchetti, Antony Antony, RIPE NCC)

  [ Presentation is online at:
      http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/np/Talks/0101_RIPE38_HU/
      http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/np/Talks/0101_RIPE38_AA/
      http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/np/Talks/0101_RIPE38_TF/ ]

  The RIS group gave three presentations

  1. Henk Uijterwaal
     In the introduction, Henk listed a few administrative items
    - RIS has progressed that for that it will be turned into a regular
      operational service very soon
    - To support this move, they are now hiring a 2nd network engineer which
      will bring the headcount to 2.5 FTE's plus 1 student (from 1-Apr on)
    - Henk again announced the PAM-2001 workshop

     Then, a sumamry of the highlights in the past months was given
    - a new database was introduced to keep up with performance requirements
    - more powerful hardware was installed, and a scaling analysis will be
      done with it
    - currently there are 4 Remote Route Collectors (RRC) at RIPE NCC, LINX,
      AMS-IX, SFINX; anybody interested in peering to put data into RIS is
      welcome to contact Antony Antony
    - two more RRCs are planned, investigating where to place them
    - work has been done on the user interface, with output on: web, email
    - vanilla, strawberry, chocolate: which view of the routes do we have
      in the RIS? The flavors distinguish different amounts of routing info,
      ranging from filtered and restricted output (vanilla) to the full set
      of routes (chocolate); RIS prefers to see more
    - following several requests from different sources (ISMA project, Hermes,
      ASExplorer,...), the raw data is now available (announced yesterday),
      check out URL http://abcoude.ripe.net/ris/rawdata

     During the next months the RIS team plans to
    - move to production during 2001
    - proceed with route collection and expand it
    - improve and extend the user interface
    - proceed with network research

     Henk stressed again that he very much welcomes welcomes input from the
     community on this project.

  Joachim reminded Henk of the action, the Routing WG has put on the RIS team,
  to also implement route flap statistics. Henk confirmed that this is on the
  list of topics to analyse.

  2. Thomas Franchetti
     In the second part, Thomas presented some results from data collected
     by RIS
    - statistics of numbers of prefixes by length
      show a noticable increase of /24, and /32
    - origin ASs announcing only one prefix - distribution of prefix lengths
      again shows the increase of /24, and /32
    - statistics of how many ASs announce certain number of prefixes
      most ASs announce only very few prefixes, number of announcements per
      AS is on average decreasing
     The graphs shown will be made available on the web before RIPE39.

   Conclusion:
    - it is necessary to view larger periods to see trends more clearly.
    - there is a lot of data in RIS, and lots of potential ways to analyze
      it, but not easy to find ways of presentation; this definitely needs
      to be explored

  Joachim finds the parallels interesting between the RIS project results,
  and other analysis like the one by Philip Smith (distributed on the Routing
  WG mailing list), or the "standard" CIDR report by Tony Bates. Joachim
  is eager to see more results at RIPE39, and also welcomes any input from
  the community; after all these stats are just a glimpse at the wealth of
  data collected at RIS.

  3. Antony Antony
     In the third part of the presentations on RIS, Antony presented some
     peculiar RIS observations:
    - regarding negligence in aggregation, it is amazing how big a number
      of more specifics is announced from small prefixes (up to several 1000s
      in a /8)
    - looking at AS path length, a path with 123 ASs was found, which is
      very peculiar; this causes several problems, e.g. Cisco actually
      resets because of missing buffer space; there is also a known Cisco
      bug where an empty AS path may appear, and thus care must be taken
      if filtering on AS path length
    - if AS numbers are considered as such, roughly 82% of RIPE NCC assigned
      AS numbers are visible by RIS, and the question arises: where are the
      others? Actually, the RIPE region is still in pretty good shape because
      the global average is 50%.

  Following up on this, Daniel Karrenberg added some observations and 
comments.
  He noted that the full feed they get from a neighbor consists of 81,272
  prefixes, but the maximum number of prefixes from a peer is 100,461.
  In the beginning, the difference between the extremes was just a couple
  of thousands, but obviously has expanded tremendously. As Randy Bush
  has pointed out during the EOF session, it is possible to go down to
  around 80k prefixes without loosing connectivity. Possibly, people
  announce redundant data. RIS may be used to catch the source of those
  redundant data. Daniel was musing whether the NCC should suggest filter
  lists but would want more discussion on that.


D. Routing Registry Consistency Checking (Shane Kerr, RIPE NCC)
  [ The presentation is available at
  
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/archive/ripe-38/presentations/rrcc-ripe38/in

dex.html ]

  Shane reports that the RIPE IRR currently holds around 24k route objects
  and 4k AS objects. The quality of the contents varies widely, because there
  are people who really update their objects, and others who don't. To improve
  data quality, the data in the IRR is compared to what is found on the
  Internet.
  
  However, the goal is not just reporting, but help to improve the IRR and
  make it more useful. This is the idea behind the Routing Registry
  Consistency Checking (R2C2).

  The following slides gave an overview of the approach, the status, progress,
  and the plans of the project.

  Besides route objects and AS objects (routing policies), there are also
  supporting objects like AS macros which form a set of data to be compared
  to RIS data. Several reports and tools are in the make, like
  - summary report
  - specific report
  - router configuration checker
  - IRR correction wizard
  The project has reached a status where comparisons are possible, and
  mismatches may be identified. Prototype interfaces and a prototype
  correction wizard are available.

  A web page for the project exists with a practical example of the prototype
  interface.

  The next steps include polishing and finishing current software, publishing
  a summary of the project as RIPE-201 document, and seeking community input.
  Potential possible directions include
  - a view from specific route collector on request
  - checking aut-num policy with AS paths
  - a router configuration verification
  Additional suggestions include working together with other IRRs and on
  request from the community develop further applications.

This was the last topic in the Routing WG session itself. The second slot was
dedicated to a joint session of the Routing and Database WGs dealing with
RPSL transition issues.


Y. Input from other WGs

  There was no input from other WGs.


Z. AOB

  There was no other business.


Summary of Open Action Points from the Routing WG

  36.R1 on RIPE NCC
        During the transition phase to the RPSL software
        - verify with RADB on their test suites for RPSL implementations
        - coordinate with RADB on consistent mirroring of databases (NRTM)
        - coordinate with RADB on consistent whois interface of databases
          including irrd
        status: ongoing

  37.R1 on C.Panigl, P.Smith, D.Karrenberg, J.Schmitz
        Provide updates to RIPE-210
        - general editing, review
        - explanation of damping parameters
        - examples by implementation
        - script to determine TLD/root nameservers for "golden network" list
        status: ongoing

  37.R2 on RIS team, Henk Uijterwaal
        Implement route flap analysis from RIS data
        status: ongoing


Engin Gunduz, Joachim Schmitz, February 2001