RIPE 28

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Local IR Working Group
at RIPE 28, Amsterdam

Chair: Mike Norris
Scribe: Anne Lord

1. Preliminaries

Mike opened the meeting and welcomed the attenders to the session.
Anne Lord volunteered to be scribe. There were 70 attenders at the
working group session.

2. Open action items

Minutes of RIPE 27 have been circulated and corrections made. There
are no open action items from the previous meeting.

3. Report from Registries

RIPE NCC - Mirjam Kuehne

Graph of current EU DNS hostcount shown - likely to hit 5 million before
the end of the month.

New staff - two new hostmasters : Julia Edwards from the US and Sabrina
Waschke from Germany. Brings the total staff to 11 full time and 1 part
time staff.
Response time to hostmaster requests is now 1 working day for an
acknowledgement.
Wait queue is now growing again (additional load caused by hiring of new
hostmasters). Staff getting an increased number of phone calls now with
mostly IP related questions.

Automation improvements have helped. Reverse delegation is now fully
automated. Ticketing system improved in performance and functionality.
A web interface has been developed for allowing queries of ticket status
(see report by Mal Morris below). A registry now has one main handler
(hostmaster) for each registry plus one or two backup handlers (hostmasters).

Auditing and monitoring work extends to 3 parts:

1) Monitoring in daily work

* database accuracy
* complete documentation available
* compliance with policies

2) Proactive Audits

LIRs that they have little contact with e.g. those established for a long
time will be contacted to see if they are in touch with latest procedures.

3) Audits on request

If you wish to discuss procedures/practices of local IR's you can send your
comments to the RIPE NCC. They will then investigate.

John Crain is working on the quality initiative with respect to local IRs.

Most LIRs do follow the guidelines. The main problem is due to dangling
references in the RIPE db. A RIPE document is in preparation about the
auditing process and the statistics found after a consistency check of the
RIPE db. This is expected to be published soon after the meeting.

Internal QA

Internal procedures are now documented more clearly. They also have more
structured staff training. Monitoring of the RIPE NCC registry files
has also started.

LIR Training courses

5 courses have been given since the last RIPE meeting. Ukraine course was
cancelled due to lack of interest. The NCC has a "no show" policy. This
is as follows: New LIRs get priority in their first year; "local" LIRs get
priority - 2 places per local IR. After places are used they have no prior
ity anymore - this means either attended or not shown up.

Plans and Promises

Plan to continue quality activities and more resources have been added to
this activity. Work flow management which is more structured will be
introduced. Internal procedures will be further automated.

Next LIR courses (planned)

October : Paris (in conjunction with Interop)
October : London
November: Berlin
November: Prague
December: Rome

They run a script to see where most new local IRs are coming from to
determine city where to give training course.

Slides: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/presentations/ripem28-mir-RS-REPORT.ps
http://www.ripe.net/meetings/ripe/ripe-28/pre/ncc-reg

APNIC

Decision on city of relocation not final - but it will be in Australia.
Plan to relocate involves keeping two offices - one in Tokyo for a short
period of time.

ARIN

On course to go live in approximately 2-3 weeks time. Encountered some
legal problems which are now overcome.

AFRI-NIC

Nothing has been formalised apart from it's principle of establishment.

4. IP Address Space Assignment

Policy document revision

Please note : ripe-159 is now the policy document [replacing ripe-140,
which replaced ripe-104]. Accompanying documents are still ripe-141 and
ripe-142.

Use of class A address space

Registries can have two allocations: one traditional and one from class A
address space. Caveats are that you may encounter difficulties with
classless routing out in the Internet.
However, Mirjam commented that so far no problems have been experienced.
From this you could conclude that we do operate in a classless Internet
and that the traditional classfull boundaries are in fact almost extinct.
There was a question about amount allocated so far. So far about 50 ranges
have been allocated. Question was asked about amount of allocations announc
ed on the Internet, but the answer was not known.

Web interface to the Ticketing System

Maldwyn Morris gave a "live" demonstration of the RIPE NCC ticketing system
which will shortly be available via the web pages. Check out:

http://www.ripe.net/cgi-bin/rttquery

Question: How much longer you have to wait in queue once handed off to
hostmaster.
Answer: This should not be more than one day. This information would
be added to the web page. Suggestion to add name of the hostmaster
dealing with your request to the web page. There was quite some discussion
about this and it was not agreed to do so explicitly. Plans also to
include information about closed tickets.

5. Registry procedures

Suggestions to couple reverse delegations to assignments and to make this
tool web based. Discussion on the list as to how to go about this. Suggesti
ons included using "mnter" based authentication, SSL, PGP etc... Further
discussions needed with the Database group on formats & mechanisms for
protection.

Carol gave a report on the status of IP address web allocation. Work is
being done on auto-parsing the email message before it goes to the
hostmaster on a sanity check on what you have sent in. Now needed is the
web interface.

There is still the area of security for consideration when sending in
requests. So far, this has not been considered.

It had been suggested that if the request is accepted, it would
automatically update the RIPE database (and go further in updating
reverse db). There was quite some discussion about this but no action
items emerged. Carol said that the NCC did not favour the suggestion.

So to conclude, the mechanisms for parsing are in place but are not yet
released.

Wilfried suggested to put security mechanisms on the "input from other
working groups" so as to start a discussion and think some more about this.

Tools for local registries

ripe-141.{ps,txt} forms are available for use with customers of local IRs.
There was a suggestion to put links from any useful web pages on tools to
Local IR page and the "tools" page at the RIPE NCC. There was an action
item place on Mike Norris to make this happen. (A1:28 see below).

6. Input/output with other working groups

None discussed at this meeting.

7. Statistics

i) Reverse DNS counts, errors are archived on RIPE web site.
Blasco suggested doing some analysis of DNS reverse error counts.
RIPE NCC agreed this was a good idea and at some stage was to be
put on the activity plan. This was taken as an action item by the
RIPE NCC.

ii) Effect of NAT etc on PI address space. Diminuation of PI address
space usage? Should every ISP use PI address space for multihoming?
There was actually little discussion on this issue.

8. AOB

i) Mailing lists

Clarification of the RIPE NCC mailing lists. "Open" mailing lists are:

* ripe-list@ripe.net
* db-wg@ripe.net
* dns-wg@ripe.net
* lir-wg@ripe.net

etc..

lir-wg@ripe.net working group is for discussions, open to anyone, not
monitored right now but will be in the future.

All maintained by majordomo.

Blasco suggested to have a web interface to read archives of working group
mailing lists [action NCC]

"Closed" Mailing lists for contributors only:

local-ir@ripe.net
ncc-co@terena.nl

Not managed by majordomo.

is open only to contributing local IRs. Is
automatically subscribed to. Used for announcements relevant to
registries only. Low traffic. Is monitored to filter out spam and
to deal with bounces. Requests or questions to

Question of duplication was raised and how to handle it. Carol added that
NCC has proposed a new activity to look at filtering out duplicate messages.

Anti-Spam

Spam topic related. Want to close public submission to the open lists.
so that we can limit the spam. Suggestion to match against a list of
domain names that mail is allowed to be posted to the list from. Geert Jan
had another suggestion which involved blocking specific addresses that
people spam from against a list of permitted addresses. However people can
forge headers. Discussion moved to plenary and to working group lists.
Suggestions to give some consideration to email discussions on this prior
to the plenary discussion.

Recommendation to gather together individuals that are contributing on this
topic and to collate information on how to deal with Spam attacks. In the
plenary, Daniel suggested that the local IR working group continue working
on this. Mike Norris took an action to gather the various proposals on
spamming and circulate to the working group list.

Summary of open action items:

Action 1:28
Mike Norris to put a link on the RIPE NCC web page and the working group
page to useful LIR tools.

Action 2:28
RIPE NCC to prepare an analysis of the reverse DNS error counts.

Action 3:28
Mike Norris to collect information on anti-spamming policies and circulate
to the list in a draft paper the recommendations on dealing with spam.

Action 4:28
RIPE NCC to produce web interface to archives of WG mailing lists.