Meeting Report

The fifth South East Europe (SEE)/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting took place from 19-20 April 2016 at the Tirana International Hotel in Tirana, Albania. A total of 136 attendees from 19 countries participated in the meeting, 88 of whom were from Albania.

The meeting was hosted by the Albanian National Research and Education Network (RASH) and the RIPE NCC and was sponsored by the Internet Society (ISOC) and ABCom.

Jan Žorž, SEE Programme Committee Chair, opened the meeting, thanking attendees for their participation, particularly the large number of Albanian attendees in the audience. Arjan Xhelaj from RASH, SEE 5 host, then provided an introduction to his organisation's goals in Albania.

Peering and Internet exchange points (IXPs) featured prominently in the general discussion throughout SEE 5. Given the local support for the establishment of an IXP in Albania, several presentations sparked discussion on the subject from various points of view.

Martin Semrad's overview of the FENIX project provided information on how collaboration among different entities can create a combined resistance to DoS attacks through smart peering and high redundancy.

The discussion around peering continued on the second day, beginning with Edwin Punt's “Internet Story”, which provided advice on how to start peering and how to choose an IXP. This theme continued into the IXP Plenary, first as Goran Slavic provided advice on what to consider when establishing an IXP from scratch, then as Martin Levy facilitated an interactive panel on the pros and cons of interconnecting IXPs. The audience got to hear from large-scale international IXPs, such as DE-CIX, as well as more locally- or regionally-operating IXPs such as NIX.CZ.

Maarit Palovirta from ISOC also touched on IXPs as her presentation discussed the role IXPs play in developing connectivity on domestic and international levels. Together with the previous presentations, and the animated discussion in the lobby during break times, this kind of knowledge-sharing seemed to help the local community towards the establishment of an IXP in Albania.

Another common feature among the presentations was security, featuring DNSSEC and DoS attacks. Jan Zorz's presentation on DNSSEC signing using DANE discussed how his results in the Go6Lab suggested DANE could easily be applied on a wider scale. Sergey Myasoedov's statistical report on DNSSEC and root zone key signing questioned whether DANE really had the uptake it deserved with regard to its use in .com and .net zones. Paul Neumann's presentation looked at the resistance of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks to massive scale DoS attacks, and the methods required to enable their self-recovery.

The SEE 5 audience was treated to many more informative presentations, including Szymon Trocha's introduction to a measurement system called perfSONAR, Matthijs Mekking on what it's like inside an IETF meeting, and Fotjon Kosta on Albania's national broadband strategy up to 2020.

There were a number of presentations from the RIPE NCC included in the meeting agenda. Ingrid Wijte, Registration Services Assistant Manager, described the process of obtaining and managing IP addresses, with a particular focus on requests and transfers in Albania. Christian Teuschel, System Architect, presented a collection of Internet measurement data, again with a focus on Albanian traffic. Axel Pawlik, Managing Director of the RIPE NCC, gave a general update on the organisation's performance and its current priorities, along with some statistics and membership trends.

The meeting presentations were given in English. The presentations are available in the presentation archive. Videos of the presentations are available on the South East Europe Regional Meeting YouTube channel.

The RIPE NCC requested feedback from attendees on how it could improve further meetings. Feedback can also be given through an online survey.

The SEE 6/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting will take place in Budva, Montenegro, from 12-13 June 2017.