RIPE 56

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Test Traffic Working Group Minutes from RIPE 56
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RIPE Meeting: 56
Working Group: Test Traffic
Status: Final

Co-chairs Ian Meikle and Henk Uijterwaal
Scribe Rene Wilhelm
Jabber Henk Uijterwaal

A. Administrative Matters
* Welcome
* Select a scribe
* Jabber Monitor
* Microphone Etiquette
* Minutes from working group session at RIPE 55
* Finalise agenda

B. New Working Group Chair - Ian Meikle, Nominet

Working for Nominet, Ian volunteered to become the tt-wg chair in response to the call for new chair made at the RIPE55 meeting. His primary interests are with the applications built on top of TTM, such as DNSMON. However, more generally he is also intereseted
to know how systems operate, how they connect.

C. IETF IPPM Working Group Update - Henk Uijterwaal, RIPE NCC
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/Uijterwaal-4_IPPM_Developments.pdf

Henk presented the work the IETF IPPM group has accomplished over the last 10 years. Although some items are still progressing and IPPM have a few other things on their plate, all in all there isn't that much work left; the group is reaching the end of its current charter. At the next IETF, in Dublin, Ireland, IPPM will discuss the options for future work items and associated changes to the charter. To have a broad discussion, IPPM are seeking input from the community. If you have ideas, suggestions for the group, do not hesitate to step forward: contact any of the IPPM chairs or send comments to the ippm@localhost mailing list.

There were no questions.

D. ccTLD Use of DNSMON - Ian Meikle, Nominet
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/Meikle-DNSMON.pdf

Ian showed how Nominet, the registry for .uk, use the DNSMON service to augment their own monitoring system based on Nagios. At the beginning of each month, they check the DNSMON graphs to verify how the name servers had been performing the previous month. Because DNSMON probes the name servers from different vantage points, it can distinguish between problems with the nameserver itself and problems further upstream in the network (when a server is reachable from some but not all monitoring probes).

Questions:

Daniel Karrenberg (RIPE NCC) commented the graphs shown must have been created long after the events took place; the resolution on the time axis is very coarse. Because data are kept in an RRD database, the granularity changes as time goes by. Ruben van Staveren (RIPE NCC) confirmed: for the first 30 days resolution is 1 minute, then 100 days at five minutes, and then 400 days at one hour. Ian was advised to check more frequently to get most fine grained time resolution.

E. Available Bandwidth Measurements - Andrei Shukhov
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/Sukhov-Estimation_of_available_bandwidth.pdf

Andrei Shukhov addressed the tt-wg meeting from Samara, Russia via videoconferencing. Andrei presented the work on estimating available bandwidth by measuring delays of differently sized packets.

Questions:

Daniel Karrenberg (RIPE NCC) enquired about verification of the results.

Andrei replied the methodology had been tested with the ping utility; the results are comparably to those obtained with (more intrusive) iperf tool on an unloaded link. It could not yet be tested on TTM boxes because those miss an easy interface for measuring different packet sizes.

F. TTM Network Update - Ruben van Staveren, RIPE NCC
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/van_Staveren-TTM_Network_Update.pdf

Ruben gave an update on developements in the TTM network and service during the last 6 months. More nodes have been added and are in progress of being deployed.

No questions.

G. TTM Futures Update - Mark Dranse and Franz Schwarzinger, RIPE NCC
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/Franz_Schwarzinger-TTM_Futures_Updates.pdf

Mark and Franz presented the new structure and new features of TTM service. The pricing structure has been fixed, the concept of a sponsored node has been formalized in document RIPE-430. In terms of service, the additions are a plug-in based platform for ad-hoc measurements and an upgraded, innovative three stage system for TTM alarms.

Questions:

The question was raised if instead of developing plug-ins, a plug-in based interface, it wouldn't be better to make an API description and have the ad-hoc testing run as open source. That way RIPE NCC would get more input from the community.

Franz replied there are no plans now to open up and give it to the community. However, if the test-traffic working group wants it, it could, technically, be possible.

Ian Meikle queried how the four test-boxes which reported results in the ad-hoc testing demo were selected.

Franz replied that for the demo, boxes involved in the test were randomly selected from the four regions, Europe, Asia, North America, South America. In the next weeks, the user interface will be enhanced, such that users can select the boxes they want to use for a measurement.

Z. A.O.B

No other business.