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Minutes

NCC staff
Working Group Chairs/Scribes

Berlin, Germany
April 22-24, 1996
ripe-m-24.txt

1. Opening

1.1. Welcome

Rob Blokzijl welcomed the participants to the 24th RIPE meeting in Berlin, which was (co-)organised by DFN and held in the Mathematics Building of the Technical University of
Berlin. After that, Dr. Klaus Rebensburg from the university held an opening speech. He showed some data about Berlin, among others the various scientific institutions and the network projects that the University was involved in.

1.2. Papers tabled

  • Agenda for the 24th RIPE meeting
  • Working Group Agendas
  • List of Participants of the 24th RIPE meeting
  • CIX magazine

2. Adoption of the agenda

Aside from a minor change (as Elise Gerich could not come, Gerald Winters would hold the Routing Arbiter update report), there were two additions to the agenda:

  • Joachim Schmitz would give a presentation on the new German broadband research network.
  • Rob Blokzijl would speak a few words about the European Council who are looking into the structure of the European Internet and the need to impose regulations.

These points were handled at convenient times in between the other agenda points and are minuted under AOB.

3. Minutes 23rd RIPE meeting

The minutes of the last meeting were approved with no changes.

4. Action points 23rd RIPE meeting

The action items from the 23rd RIPE meeting minutes were reviewed. The following list comprises the ongoing action items only. All other action items were closed.

Action 23.1 on Geert Jan de Groot
To write up recommendations for managing nameserver configurations.

Action 23.3 on RIPE NCC
To incorporate a page where TLD policies can be published at its WWW site.

Action 23.5 on RIPE NCC
To include a pointer to the EU-Mbone-FAQ in the RIPE WWW-server.

Action 23.8 on Daniel Karrenberg
To circulate a detailed proposal for the stored: attribute.

Action 23.11 on Wilfried Woeber
To initiate discussion on the mailing list about the extension of the inet-rtr: object.

5. RIPE NCC report

For the first time, the RIPE NCC report was given by 3 people.

First, Mirjam Kuehne gave a status report on the registration services. She showed some statistics on a.o. the number of incoming messages to <hostmaster@ripe.net> and the number of registries (that is still growing with a rate of about 1 per working day).

Upon touching the closure of the Last Resort registries, which the NCC is still dealing with, there were some questions from the audience. Wilfried Woeber asked who of the Last Resort registries wanted to remain operating and thus become a normal provider registry. Mirjam answered that in many of these cases, the Last Resort registry was operated in conjunction with another (provider) registry by the same company, so after some discussion they would probably also close. Miguel Sanz wanted to know what the actual process of closing the registries comprised. The answer was: these registries will not receive service anymore and they will be asked to return the free address space to the NCC.

Joachim Schmitz wanted to know what the new request tracking system was that the RIPE NCC was using. Mirjam told that after looking at some existing packages that were not considered suitable, an own system had been made. It was hoped that the system would soon be ready to be released to the interested people, after some debugging was done.

Slides of Mirjam's report can be found at:

  • ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/presentations/ripe-m24-mir-RS-Report.ps.gz

The new business manager Carol Orange went on with a presentation on the new website that the RIPE NCC was working on, together with the School of Communication Systems in Utrecht. She showed a basic outline of how the site was going to look, and went into the system that would be used to prevent links to outdated information. After the website presentation she spent a few words on the financial situation of the RIPE NCC.

An overview of this can also be found in the Quarterly report, which is available at:

  • ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-135.{txt|ps}

There were a few remarks about the website from the audience, among others that it would not be a good idea to have a visitors counter as caching of webpages will be done more and more. Also, there was a demand for information about which addresses are allocated to which registries. Carol said this would be incorporated in the website.

Action 24.1 on RIPE NCC
To incorporate information about which addresses are allocated to which registries in the website.

After this, Daniel Karrenberg touched a few other subjects. He told that at last the NCC has been able to do some more technical project again, in the form of the redundant route robot which was caused by the discussion at the 23rd RIPE meeting. Daniel noted that it is important for the NCC to be able to react to RIPE's needs.

Another point was that the period for budget planning of 12 months is actually too long. One thing where this can be seen is the increase in the number of registries, that is again higher than expected. At the next Contributors' Committee meeting in September, the NCC will probably suggest a shorter planning period.

The restructuring of the NCC in terms of persons, which was necessary due to the growth, has been taken up. There is more hierarchy and division of tasks, now that there is a Manager Registration Services and a Business Manager. Daniel noted that the technical/software development would follow and also urged everyone who knew somebody with the qualifications for a Manager Technical Staff, to take up contact with the NCC, as this position is extremely hard to fill.

Willi Huber had a question about the developments on the new usage-based charging scheme. The response was that with the new ticketing system, measurements have started. However, Daniel said that there is no clear direction yet in which plans will develop.

6. Routing Arbiter Report

Gerald Winters showed some slides that highlighted the developments in the Routing Arbiter tools. One of them is the AS Explorer, that now shows the ASes in a better way with (where possible) the names of the ASes instead of the numbers. Also, the amount of BGP traffic between ASes is displayed. Of each AS, time statistics on BGP traffic can be viewed.

Another tool is rtconfig, that now can also deliver code to configure Cisco routers.

Gerald said that, because of the ongoing effort in Merit to clean up duplicate entries in the RADB, the number of AS and route objects is still decreasing. He also spoke a few words about who uses the RADB to register their policy or to configure their routers from it.

There was a question from Ivan Communod on how the AS Explorer gets the names for the ASes. Gerald did not have the precise answer.

7. Address space & routing: conservation vs aggregation

Daniel Karrenberg stated that the developments concerning this agenda point had already been discussed in the Routing working group and that they were also reported in the RIPE NCC Quarterly report. He had put this item on the plenary agenda to see if the audience had any questions or stories about developments since the last meeting. Also, he wanted to urge the audience to make other people aware of the problems and get them to do the right thing.

There were not many reactions. A few questions were raised about publishing the statistics of the redundant route robot somewhere, so that it was publicly visible who the big offenders were. Daniel noted that that is already being done (a top 10 is sent to the Routing working group every week) and that it is planned to make statistics available nearly realtime.

8. Review of RIPE NCC Activity Plan

Rob Blokzijl reported on the BOF about the revision of the Activity Plan that was held earlier. All the points in the activity plan had been reviewed. It was felt that the activity plan did not need much updating. One or two points could be deleted and one new action had been proposed.

Rob noted that people who are interested can join the discussion on the (majordomo-maintained) mailinglist <ncc-review@ripe.net>.

Below follows a brief list of comments and proposals that were received on the various action points during the BOF. All points not mentioned are unchanged.

3.2 c) Integrity of data:
Not very active, should be taken up again now that staffing situation has improved.

Action 24.2 on Daniel Karrenberg
To make a proposal for discussion in the Database Working Group about how integrity checking of the RIPE Database should be taken up.

3.4 Coordination of database exchange
Difficult to fulfill. Proposed to reformulate to reflect realistic possibilities.

3.5 Keep record of operational contact points
Not realistic. Proposed to remove activity.

3.6 Placement of name servers
Proposed to reformulate (monitoring & consistency checking)

3.9 Routing Registry Maintenance
Not very active though useful activity. Needs more resources (1.5 FTE) Proposed to split into 2 activities: Routing Registry maintenance and training support for Local IRs.

3.10 PRIDE Tools Maintenance
Needs reformulating, current version is useless

4.2 Database management tools
Needs reformulating to be more general (not only whois)

4.3 DNS quality control tools
Proposal to remove

9. IETF Report

Joyce Reynolds held a talk about the last IETF meeting held in Danvers. She gave a comprehensive overview of the structure of the IETF and of changes in the working groups and the IAB/IESG, and of things happening in her own area, User Services. Joyce published excellent, ASCII text, sheets which probably give the best summary of her talk and can be found at:

  • ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/presentations/ripe-m24-jkrey-IETF.txt

10. Working Group reports

The chairs from the various working groups gave reports on the working group meetings that were held earlier. The minutes made by each working group chair/scribe follow below, if they have been published to date. It is expected that more will be included in a next version of these RIPE Meeting minutes.

(The minutes may have been edited slightly to align the style with the rest of the minutes. Separate working group minutes in original form can be retrieved from ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/minutes/ )

10.1. Routing Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 24

10.2. Local IR working group

Minutes: RIPE 24

10.3. Netnews Working group

Minutes: RIPE 24

11. Next RIPE meetings

The scheduling of the next meetings was discussed and the following dates and locations were agreed:

  • RIPE 25 - September 1996 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
    (Note: The date was later set to September 23-25)
  • RIPE 26 - January 1997 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • RIPE 26 - April 1997 - Dublin, Ireland

12. AOB

Two agenda items that had been added and handled at convenient times in between the other points:

12.1. Developments in European Council

Rob Blokzijl told the audience that there was a point of decision on the agenda of the European Commission to start a process that will investigate the problems of the European Internet and impose regulations.

He stated that RIPE had two options: either ignore this and possibly have regulations imposed on them in the future, or investigating what goes on and trying to influence the direction that will be taken.

Daniel Karrenberg noted that if the last option is pursued, then this clearly changes the charter of RIPE which used to be a forum for purely technical issues. Robs answer was that the RIPE NCC has already been broadening its scope, and the European Council will see the NCC as a regulatory body. He hereby referred to the NCC charging model.

Aidan McDonald noted stated that he thought the focus of the European Commission would be mainly on social affairs, referring to a presentation he had seen from an Irish Minister who is part of the Council. Rob said that this was one issue, but that there was also a commission that was going to study regulation.

Mike Norris made a statement: As Internet people we tend to laugh at bureaucrats imposing regulations. We must realise that to a certain extent we are bureaucrats ourselves, and impose regulations on ourselves, in order to run our business and keep the Internet working together. We should perhaps look how we can persuade the European Council that what we do already, is a good thing.

12.2. Presentation about B-WiN

Joachim Schmitz gave a presentation about the new Breitband Wissenschaftsnetzwerk (B-WiN, = broadband research network) that is installed all over Germany. In the past few years, there had been several investigations on higher bandwidth than the currently used WiN (Wissenschaftsnetzwerk) that runs IP over x.25. The network that came out and is now built is a Virtual Private Network based on ATM. The German backbone is 34 Mbit/s, some of the network's lines are 155 Mbit/s. At the moment there will only be IP services delivered, later it is planned to have the possibility of direct ATM connections for customers.

Joachim showed some maps and statistics about test results and how the network is now. The empty network has been tested and at this moment customers are being moved from the WiN to the B-WiN.

Daniel Karrenberg asked if there was a solution for the fact that there were now 34 Mb lines inside Germany and all outside links were 9 or 10 Mb. Joachim answered that this was still being investigated. Traffic analysis had shown that 70% of the traffic stays inside Germany.

Peter Lothberg asked if there were any Internet Exchanges connected to the B-Win, like in Sweden. Joachim answered that other ISPs are customers of the network. There are no public IXes. To a question of Aidan McDonald on who provided the switching equipment, he answered that Deutsche Telekom did this at the main nodes. Others are also provided by the customers themselves. These switches are the same.

Erik-Jan Bos asked if there had already been some tests with IP over VPB. There had, and if anybody was interested Joachim could provide a pointer to the test results.

13. Closing

Rob Blokzijl thanked the TU Berlin for providing the room facilities and DFN, specifically Juergen Rauschenbach, for the efforts in organising the meeting, and declared the meeting closed.