RIPE 35

Chair: Keith Mitchell (keith@linx.net)
Scribe: Vanessa Evans (vanessa@linx.net)
Minutes: Mike Hughes (mike@linx.net)

Venue: St John's Room I, Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam

Start: 9.30am

Apologies: Fearghas McKay (and thanks to Keith for taking the chair)

Agenda Items
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1) European Exchange Point Updates
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AMS-IX
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Number of members of AMS-IX is now 82, compared to 62 in November 1999.
There are experiments with multicasting in progress (MBGP, MSDP, PIM-SM).
They have installed a new switch architecture, Foundry Networks BigIron
8000 switches replacing the older Cisco hardware.
AMS-IX are now looking for a third co-location site within Amsterdam, and
have their first full time employee, Job Witteman, manager of the AMS-IX
Bureau.

CERN
----
They now have 20-25 members, and otherwise, there have been no changes to
the structure of the CERN exchange.

LINX
----
There are 95 LINX members, and peak traffic is around 1.5 Gig/sec.
(These numbers are now 100 members, and 2.1 Gig/sec traffic - Ed.)

LINX are expanding to 4 new co-location sites in London, providing LINX
exchange point services at these sites, with the sites interconnected via
dark fibre links. The LINX staff has also grown in line with the expansion
of the exchange and we have doubled our engineering staff.

LINX are operating an experimental multicast exchange, and a more detailed
presentation was given at the Multicase WG.

The LINX MoU now incorporates technical prohibitions, to enforce good
etiquette on the public peering network at the exchange.

LINX provides "Non-Core" activites as a "support" service to it members,
which include Anti-spam, Law Enforcement Regulation, Telecoms Regulation,
and Content Regulation. The Non-Core committees seek to work with the EU,
UK Government, Police, and organisations such as OFTEL, to represent the
views of the LINX membership.

Slovakian IX
------------
They now have 23 members connected to the exchange point.

SFINX
-----
Now have grown to 48 members, in the current SFINX location, in a France
Telecom building. SFINX feel the expansion is being limited by the fact
that they are housed in a France Telecom facility, as this limits the
choice of carrier to SFINX members (i.e. no choice at all - have to use
France Telecom).

They are expanding to a second site, which will be neutral with a good
choice of carrier, which is in rollout over this quarter. The two sites
will be interconnected.

A France Telecom employee in the audience commented at this point that FT
also run an exchange point in Paris (ATM-based), and while he did not have
a presentation to give, was willing to answer questions.

The chair suggested that if FT wish to publicise the presence of their
Exchange Point, they give a presentation at the next EIX-WG meeting.

VIX
---
The service is located in the Vienna University Computing Centre, and the
membership fees are low (when compared to some other IXPs). However, the
main reason for this is because support is only available on an ad-hoc
"best effort" basis, as there is not a dedicated support/engineering
staff. This hasn't actually proved to be a problem for the VIX.

VIX now has 52 members, and transfers about 370Mbps of traffic at peak.
VIX hope to offer Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to members who need it
during the course of the year.


2) Year 2000
------------

It was generally agreed that the Y2K rollover went smoothly for European
IXPs.

Keith Mitchell commented that LINX observed some increase in hacker
activity (i.e. port scanning and attempted attacks, blocked by
access-lists), and one LINX member reported a significant DoS attack
around Midnight GMT.


3) IPv6
-------

No Exchange Point in present had registered for an IPv6 allocation.

AMS-IX has been doing some tests of IPv6 using prefixes from the 6Bone.
AMS-IX were not able to get their own IPv6 allocation, as they are not a
RIPE LIR.

LINX are also looking toward registering an IPv6 allocation and commencing
IPv6 experiments during the year.

There are still some problems with buggy code, which has slowed down the
uptake of IPv6 running "native" on most networks. Some networks are
running IPv6 experimental infrastructre in parallel with or tunnelled over
their IPv4 backbones.

There is a need for better understanding/communication between the IXPs
and the early IPv6 adopters.


4) IXP Switching Wishlist
-------------------------

Mike Hughes of LINX gave a presentation outlining security and
scaleability concerns which may affect Exchange Point operators, and
suggested that more could be done pro-actively by adding intelligence in
layer 2 switching equipment, rather than reactively policing using UNIX
tools.

After visiting some switching vendors in the States, Mike found them to be
receptive to our differing needs, when compared to the Enterprise/Data
Centre marketplace.

It was suggested that IXPs could work more closely with the switch
vendors to discuss options and if possible get these features built for
us. There was also some interest from non-IXP engineers.

ACTION: On Mike Hughes and Christian Panigl to start work on converting
the presentation to a draft document, along with other interested parties.
Progress report for RIPE 36.

The presenation is archived at:

http://www.linx.net/contact/mike/presentations/ripe35/eixwg-ixpwish/


AOB
---

At this point, business on the agenda was completed, with time remaining.

A number of parties had expressed an interest in visiting the AMS-IX
housing locations at SARA and NIKHEF, during the meeting.

Many thanks to Niels den Otter from Surfnet for rapidly arranging the
visit to the AMS-IX and the fleet of taxis needed to take us there. In the
end about 30 people took up the offer to visit the AMS-IX.