Local IR Working Group

Minutes from RIPE Meeting 27

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Local IR Working Group Meeting
RIPE 27
Chair:  Mike Norris 
1. Preliminaries
- Minute taker: Paula Caslav
- Agenda: Justin Keery asked for a discussion on web tools added 
  to tools section

2.  RIPE 26: 
- minutes were approved
- actions:
- Apply for A addresses: done
- Financial back pressure on training no-shows: done
- APRICOT report: done
- DNS queries: closed

3. Reports from Registries
- European Regional Registry Report (RIPE NCC)

Miriam Kuehne:
- 2 new hostmasters: Jaco Lockhorst from Netherlands, experience 
  working for another ISP in NL, has administrative experience.  
  Maria (Pepa) Jose Tejedor from Spain, has administrative experience.
- Another staff development: John Crain now Deputy manager when 
  Miriam is away and Quality Assurance Manager. RIPE NCC will now be 
  using more resources to ensure address space is distributed fairly.
- Total Staff now: 9 full time staff, 1 part time staff
- Workload: Response time is usually 1 working day. We also have 
  a new robot for inaddr (reverse delegation).  Inaddr process is 
  now fully automatic, reduces workload because it now does a lot 
  of checks that were done manually before.

- Since last ripe meeting: 
- New staff trained, internal training document written.
- Started allocating from 62.0.0.0/8 
  More than 30 ranges allocated. Very few problems reported, have 
  already seen some reverse delegation requests.
- Have started External Auditing & Monitoring- John Crain
- Planning to start Internal Quality Control- this will include 
  consistency checks on records in database and registry records, 
  also writing of internal training documents
- The RIPE NCC has given several LIR training courses

- Plans & Promises:
- Continue external auditing & monitoring
- Continue internal consistency and quality control
- Continue LIR courses

Slides from Miriam's presentation will be available:
ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/presentations/ripe-m27-mir-RS-REPORT.ps

- Reports from other Regionals:
- Justin Keery from Cerbernet talked about helping Kenya set up 
  a registry. The region has started to have a proper digital 
  infrastructure (to a few locations), interesting to see it 
  working in this part of the world. Justin had a hard time 
  convincing them to start an IP registry.

David Conrad from APNIC gave a report:
- APNIC incorporated last April (1996), set up a somewhat unusual 
  structure to allow for flexibility: they set up a minimal shell, 
  delegated responsibility to committee of 5 members.  They serve 
  2 year terms. This executive council hires Secretary General. 
  One of their first decisions was that APNIC needs to hire a lawyer.
- IP addresses: not much is being assigned to Australia (they got 
  large amounts before the APNIC existed) Japan gets large amounts. 
  This is done through JP-nic, Korea is second. IP addresses over 
  time- very cyclical pattern.
- AS numbers- relatively constant
- APNIC membership fees- similar structure to RIPE, small, medium 
  & large registries. All members have votes, size is self-determined, 
  recurrent fees are yearly, also a confederation category.
- Membership distribution: Hong Kong largest amount of members, 
  Australia recently grew (There used to be one large registry for 
  the entire country)
-  Size distribution: 174 members, most small.
- APNIC non-member fees: some organizations don't want to be 
  members, so APNIC has a non-member price schedule for registry 
  services. There are fees for IP addresses, allocations, AS 
  numbers, reverse delegation. They still have to justify all 
  requests.
- APNIC Confederations- some organizations want to sub-allocate 
  PI blocks to customers (National NICs, transit providers) 
  There are two proposals for funding: 
	- Per confederation member US$2000
	- Or usage fee, based on size of confederation member
- APNIC is probably moving. Corporate tax range in Japan is 51.7%. 
  They are considering:
	- Australia, 
	- Malasya,
	-  Philippines
- Will be hiring more people.

Daniel Karrenberg gave a report on the Internic becoming ARIN.
- Daniel visited a week ago, preparation in full swing. They 
  will follow a RIPE NCC-like model.  The originally planned 
  operational date was around now, but has been moved back to 
  September. Formally a few steps have to be taken.  Consensus 
  has to be built (in NANOG consensus is quite solid): The 
  National Science Foundation has to formally tell Network 
  Solutions to stop doing IP assignments. This was about to 
  happen until somebody in US government (White House) put a 
  hold on it- found out about the change-over to ARIN and want 
  to understand the situation before approving it. Preparations 
  are going on anyway, if no more political problems arise, and 
  if this one is solved, it will go ahead. From RIPE NCC point 
  of view, this should bring North America in line with the way 
  we do things in Europe and Asia Pacific. 

Afri-nic: there is a proposal. Serious consensus building 
efforts have been made to start an African Regional Registry.

IANA- DARPA has stopped funding IANA. IANA has asked Regional 
Registries to help fund their activities, RR's complied.
- APNIC contributed $50,000 for a year of operation.
- RIPE was asked the same thing, RIPE NCC contributed $25,000 
  for 6 months of operation. A new structure is being formed for 
  IANA. It is proposed that it will be funded  bottom-up. The 3 
  Regionals will fund the IANA for addresses, but there's no 
  agreement as to how the DNS part will be funded. 

4. IP Address Space Assignment
- RIPE policy, (ripe-140) a few loose ends need to be discussed:
- What should be the role of the NCC in ensuring compliance 
  (auditing):
- Sometimes the NCC get reports on deviation from policies by ISPs. 
  If there are complaints, they need to be substantiated. RIPE NCC 
  will insist on some hard evidence before they will investigate 
  a report. 
- What happens when a registry doesn't comply: When you become 
  a LIR you agree to procedures, so in extreme cases the NCC 
  could refuse services, but usually they can talk to people 
  and ask them to change their policies. The NCC can lower 
  their assignment windows to double check their requests for 
  a while, if they ignore this they can refuse a new allocation. 
- When a registry asks for a new allocation, the NCC evaluates 
  how previous address space has been used, by asking for some 
  documentation on sample requests.
- Some registries mentioned that customers sometimes go 
  elsewhere because other ISPs promise a Class C address space 
  to all customers. LIRs should report such cases to RIPE NCC 
  (include some evidence, advertisement, mail received by 
  customer, etc.).
- Philip Bridge asked the RIPE NCC to provide statistics on how 
  many registries have been investigated, have had allocation 
  windows lowered, etc.., so we could see if the problem is 
  getting worse. 
- He also asked for stronger wording, and more detailed policies 
  in ripe-140 on issues like firewalls, virtual web hosting, 
  static addresses... etc. However, it was decided that  
  policies on such things need to be aligned  between all the 
  RRs, so as to completely disallow certain types of assignments; 
  it has to be decided on by the entire Internet community, not 
  just RIPE.  Right now there's PAGAN for this (only a mailing 
  list now) may become an IEPG working group. 
- IEPG WG & PAGAN: Right now there's a mailing list & discussion 
  about forming a WG. PAGAN was officially evolved when writing 
  rfc2050, talking about policies on a global level. Most of the 
  discussion now is on ARIN (Kim and David are co-chairs).
- Proposed amendment (form RIPE NCC) about confidentiality. 
  There's a part in ripe-140 that states that "documentation should 
  not be transmitted to any other party" (documentation about 
  customer requests). It was agreed to change this to: 
  "will not be transmitted".  
- Use of the available what-used-to-called Class A space: 
  ripe-155 is an extension of ripe-140, covers additional 
  procedures developed for 62.0.0.0/8. A registry can have 
  a class A and class C allocation at the same time, however 
  you cannot have two class C allocations. (Can have two 
  class A allocations) Miriam says the RIPE NCC already 
  started allocating according to the procedures, there was 
  discussion on the mailing list. The special guidelines are 
  just temporary until the end of the year. She would like to 
  hear if anybody has had problems, special experiences, etc. 
- Philip Bridge- Unisource has been assigning subnets of a B 
  class to customers. They've come across the problem that 
  although the Internet is classless to a large extent, there 
  are a lot of large networks who are still classfull on their 
  private network. 
- De-allocation of AS numbers. How do you return AS 
  numbers? - the NCC will update the new version of ripe-140 
  to document this, will provide a mechanism for returning them.

Action on RIPE NCC: re-publish the ripe-140 as a new document to 
include the above changes.

5. Training
- RIPE training courses:

Report by Miriam on RIPE NCC training courses:
- Overview:
- 4 courses in Amsterdam, Brussels, Amman, Rome (2), Helsinki
- New Technology- converted all course material to PowerPoint
- New no-show policy, the NCC often gets no-shows and have 
  to refuse other people because the course is over-subscribed. 
  There's a new policy to solve this. 
	- Every registry gets 2 places

	- No-shows lose one of their places anyway
	- LIRs get priority during first year
	- "Local" LIRs get priority

- Justin Keery suggested that local IR's should teach some local 
  courses, however Janos Zsako pointed out that the RIPE NCC is 
  neutral, and LIRs would probably not want to be trained by a 
  competitor. There would also be the problem of maintaining the 
  quality of the course and keeping it consistent throughout the 
  NCC region.
- LIR Course Schedule for upcoming months:
	- June: Birmingham, Moscow
	- July: Amsterdam, Kiev, Lyon
	- August: Munich (in conjunction with IETF), Copenhagen
	- September: Amsterdam

More info on upcoming courses on  www.ripe.net and on local-ir@ripe.net

- Justin Keery suggested that the NCC should have more info on 
  the web-site to reduce need for training courses. Miriam 
  announced that the NCC will be writing a FAQ for LIR's about 
  filling out requests and Registration Services, and the there 
  will be a web interface for the ripe-142 form.

6. Input/Output with other Working Groups
- Routing is meeting right now, Netnews was already held

7. Tools
- Justin Keery suggested that all forms should be on web, 
  reverse delegation should be heavily web-assisted, so 
  should assignment requests. Filling out the form should 
  be more automatic- you put in some information and it 
  partially generates the form for you. It was decided that 
  there will be a discussion on the web forms on the local-ir 
  mailing list.

Action point on Mike Norris to start a discussion  on this 
on the local-ir mailing list

Action Point on Justin Keery to write some initial specs for 
the web interface

8. Reverse domains:
- There was an action point on Daniel to check on what kinds 
  of errors, problems there are with reverse domains. Daniel 
  wasn't there, we'll ask him about it at plenary.

The action on Daniel turns out to be closed, as he has 
already reported on the types of error.

9. AOB
- mailing lists proposal 
- There has been a problem with traffic on local-ir, People 
  can't un-subscribe themselves from local-ir. Until now, 
  local-ir was a closed list which is subscribed to lir-wg, 
  which is an open list. This has been changed- The local-ir 
  will be a moderated list, used mainly for announcements & 
  general discussion. All other discussion will be moved to 
  lir-wg. People can unsubscribe themselves from lir-wg.
- This has been implemented last week.
- Tod Ferguson asked whether there is a guideline on the 
  contractual agreements with customers using PA space and 
  renumbering. (how long is allowed for the renumbering) 
- Rfc2008 ("Implications of Various Address Allocation
  Policies for Internet Routing") discusses it (3 months 
  as a general guideline, 6 months for exceptional cases)

Action point on RIPE NCC to add a reference to this on in ripe-140.
- RIPE website
- Justin Keery  said that up-to-date info should be on the 
  web-site. For the RIPE meeting, there was just a URL to the 
  college web-site. It should be a policy that when something 
  is announced on a mailing list, it'll be instantly added to 
  the web-site.
- There was general agreement on this.