services-wg

Note: Please be advised that this an edited version of the real-time captioning that was used during the RIPE 56 Meeting. In some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but it should not be treated as an authoritative record.

RIPE 56 RIPE NCC Services Working Group 4:00pm, Wednesday, 7 May 2008

CHAIR: All right. Everyone. This is once again that favourite working group of yours, is the RIPE NCC Service Working Group. I know you have all been waiting.

A few announcements before we start. You might have heard this before, but please look after your belongings during the meeting, don't leave things laying around behind you.

Second point is directly after this we are going followed by the RIPE AGM, that is only for registered RIPE members. RIPE NCC members. If you are RIPE NCC member and you haven't yet registered to participate in the AGM, this is [unclear] chance to do so. But you will need to get a special registration tag to be allowed into the meeting. There will be people at the door checking them that you have to show them to. You have your last chance to do this. As soon as we are done here we are going to allow a five minutes break for people to get from here to the AGM, which is in a room next door. I am sure there is going to be enough NCC staff on hand to help you.

With that let's go onto the working group. I am Kurtis Lindqvist, [unclear] chair that does most of the work, [unclear] sitting over here.

Agenda for today, we are going to do the usual scribes. We have any volunteer scribes? Anyone? I thought if we had a minute-taker from RIPE NCC which I see both of you all right. Thank you.

And then we have the reminder that this is actually being webcast, please state your names in the microphones.

Last, further we had the minutes from the last RIPE meeting, they were sent to the list, but it's somewhere after the previous RIPE meeting. There was no comments or objections to them, assume we are all happy with the minutes and consider the minutes approved. So objections? Good.

And the agenda for today is this introduction, followed by a LACNIC update by /PWA /RAOUBG, then we are going to get the RIPE NCC report by Axel and then we have the usual open microphone regarding NCC services question and after that, as I said, the general meeting.

Any additions to the agenda? No. All right. LACNIC up then.

ROQUE GAGLIANO: Thank you. Mime from LACNIC. First of you will apologise that I didn't make it on Tuesday, which was appropriate, but for this presentation, so this is going to be a short one.

One of the first highlighters that I want to mention is on last October LACNIC had its fifth anniversary and we are happy about that, so it's our sixth year in service right now.

So what happened since last RIPE meeting? First of all, what happened is that we have been working a lot in several areas, particularly we have participated in something called ELAC, which is a corporation, it's a debate between the Government and agreeing on certain goals and that they sign what's called the [unclear] commitment, which sets out 83 goals to be achieved by 2010 and LACNIC has strong participation there and particularly, we had one of the goals set in the IPv6 deployment at the Government infrastructure by 2010.

We also are participating in another project which is 6 deploy EU, that's with the European Union and RIPE is also part it have and other RIRs. And basically what's going to happens we are going to have a lot of IPv6 events all through the region.

We have also two new staff members. And finally I want to mention we are going to have a region Caribbean meeting, that's going to happen in [unclear] in July 22 and 23, so we hope some of you can make it. It's a nice part.

Talking about the new members. The first is this guy, our new communication manager. I am sure you are going to see him around in the next meetings. And the second new member is me, that's me. I am going to be working, I am working in several projects and also doing the policy managing.

So, which project are we working on right now? We are working on our new registration system that should be released this year. We are going to have some new interfaces for our members, particularly we don't have any automatic interface right now in our service, and registration software we don't have email sweeps. So we are going to have EPP running as a registration protocol to talk with our members.

We are also working on our new CRM tool for keeping track of our businesses.

We are working on a new infrastructure, network infrastructure in month have [unclear], which is also done with v6 and v4, and we are also working on our project for N new net infrastructure.

We are also involved in several NRO projects, particularly the resource certification project.

Our next meeting, knack nick 11 is going to happen is Salvador and it's going to be at the end of the month. It's three weeks ahead, so please consider travelling to this amazing city. We are going to have tutorials. We are going to have tutorial about IPv6. About [unclear] start up and peering. Regional meeting, network security, members meeting and policy forum.

Talking about policy, one of the things we are going to be discussing is our new PDP for the region, particularly with something called /KWBGS expedite process" which is basically the approval of policies without having to go through the meeting.

With regard the regional policies which the 5/8 policy and also P IPv6.

Also the policy mentions LACNIC reserve for the /13 for new allocation for new members. So there is a new policy came out just last month.

And thank you. I think it was five minutes.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Thank you, so next was Axel then.

AXEL PAWLIK: Good afternoon. My name is Axel recollect I am the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC and this is not our new office building which we might have acquired because it's nice and sunny in Amsterdam and warm, similar to here and you are sitting outside drinking beer all the time. Although these days it's tempting to go do that. But we have to work for you.

Now, this presentation of course gives a fairly high overview of the highlights of things that we have been doing for you over the last few months. And also, it serves as the report from the RIPE NCC for its members in the circumstances of the general meeting, so I will also talk about a few things that you might not find very visible on the outside world but of course, our members want to know where we spend our money and that is some of that.

So moving into that. Our infrastructure has improved, we have improved it over the last few months. You know the issues that we all have with heating not because it's summer but because the computers are so blazingly hot these days, not only in my home office but also in our ore location [unclear] we have moved our hosted equipment there to new cabinets so that nicely cooled and have enough power.

Also we have updated our links to the external works, in this case to ram 6.

We have submitted ourselves to a security audit to make sure that the set up that we have is sufficiently secure and safe and we have found out luckily enough, that is indeed the case. Some minor accommodations which we have implemented but over all it was a good thing. Of course that was done by an external party.

Our storage, yes, it's not our only photos that get bigger all the time. All the other data that we have needs lots of storage space so we have upgraded that. Not because we need more space but also because it was just all the equipment by now.

Registration services, you will be happy to hear that they are running stably with a relatively high load over the last couple of weeks but stable is the interesting thing here.

Also we have asked, in this case, KPMG to audit the processes in registration services to make sure that we actually do what we should do with regard to the policies and, also that has been positively certified in a way with some recommendations to do mostly about documentation and requirements for documentation that we have actually done this step and that step and that step. So we are now starting an improvement plan to make sure that we comply with all those recommendations.

Of course we do update our policy documents and related documents all the time. In this case the v6 related stuff.

Last time I think, last time for the first time I gave some figures on our reclamation project. We know it doesn't help but the lifetime of v4 significantly. That's not the intention. However we want to find out where address space is not used and we can get it back and give it to other people. Also we are being asked increasingly, with increasing frequency by governments and other people, do you do any such thing? Now we can say yes, we do this or these are the results and it's a bit of work, it's not terribly hard, but that's what we do.

To look at the numbers, you see I won't go through too much detail. We reclaimed about 2 million addresses, and that was 800,000 last time I talked to you at the RIPE meeting, we have five LIRs that we have contacted that said yes, we actually use this space and go away. You know, we expect that to some degree. And we want to contract 341 of you of our members and we have so far contracted 219. So we will continue this.

Oh yes. Policy: Now, I normally don't talk much about policy here. This is an exception to that we have been discussing this morning 200701, contracts with the PI holders, PI holders with LIRs and PI holders with the RIPE NCC and probably I am boring awe little bit with this but I have been asked to mention this here. There are some actions put on the RIPE NCC, and I was asked to raise the issue at the general meeting to elicit some input into this and for this purpose, this is part of the general meeting so I am doing this here and of course you can either talk to this at the end of my presentation here or a little bit later in the closed general meeting, members only, next door.

The question that we have involve specially around special membership. We want to do this through standard RIPE NCC service contracts. That means people would have to be members. PI holders would have to be members the we think it would be appropriate to do that as a new membership class in a form of an associate member. Of course we also want to get some input from you in what you think are reasonable fee levels here. Again, the contract with RIPE NCC for PI holders should be an exception, we expect and hope that most of the PI holders will run to you to our members to the LIRs and have contracts with those and I have been asked to produce some contract principles to you to help you to set those contracts up, to draw them up.

I have done that. Customer services: You know for quite sometime we have a group internally that tries to do first level support for quite a number of our departments that's setting up new LIRs, that's for the billing crowd, that's for database, DNS user support, and also administrative support for info services that's coming up now. That works quite well. We have response times there of about a day. I am I want to keep it that way an get it down of course. We have done some new software that is visible for new applicants, the new LIR applicants but also some software that you don't see that helps us internally to work efficiently and you know with joy and nice graphical interface as well.

Right. They work quite /SL I said. Here is some numbers. These are the number of tickets over the last year and I won't go into much detail here either. Of course this is not the end of it. We want of course to see a development in here that we see the [unclear] and also would expect in the long run that the number of those tickets should go down a bit, because we are just now then (trends) finding out where the problem points or the issues with interfacing with us are and we would think that we learn from that and can deal with those issues and then the tickets go down. That's at least the intention.

Okay. Training services. We do LIR courses, Routing Registry courses, DNS courses for LIRs for quite sometime and you know you see where we are planning to go. Again, if you want us to come to your area, contact us, we will try to fit it in if there is enough interest in the area.

Other training activities include talking to other people than LIRs, that is universities, we want to get into the curricula and we have had first experiences then in giving short training courses there. We have been invited by the European Commission to come for a training day, which Filiz and Ana and I do two weeks ago I think. That was quite success. Although quite a number people there, we have seen before and they know the big issues. However, some new aspects always come up so it's a good thing. We really, really like that. And of course we do get invitation to say various conferences, especially now we are on v6/v4 issues and we go and present there as well.

Okay. The e-learning centre. We have been working that for quite sometime. You have some modules on line. We find that it is relatively difficult to move as quickly and in as high quality as we really would like to. So, we have start today work with an external company just to help us along and get good stuff out to you.

Database: You know that we have a data protection task force on Monday. In Monday those poor people locked them he selves in a room upstairs for 5 to 6 hours to wrap this all up. We have renewed terms and conditions for database use and we will have an in detail presentation of all this later this week.

The main points here is that, now we have the purpose of the database clearly defined, we sort of knew what it was for before of course. Also, an interesting point, the RIPE NCC can actually now go and remove data that is clearly out of date and not used any more.

Only maintainers may update the database, that makes sense, and you will see how it goes at the closing plenary on Friday morning.

Non-personal Near Real Time Mirroring. It is a mouth full. Basically what we do on request of many people, we filter out personal data into the database and set it up so that you can download it on a real time, near real time basis to get the interesting stuff out of it.

Some statistics: IP average is, 94 cures per second. If you look back into January last year, that was 33 queries per second, so there is quite some increase, and well we are IPv6, it's relatively low as we also saw earlier; that is generally the case.

Some eye candy here, some statistics and of course you can look at it on line as well.

Certification: You might have heard about this; the idea here is that we clearly identify business value for you and also for us, and make that very clear that that is why we are doing this. So we have the certification task force there helping us along over quite sometime all right. And we want to clearly also show you and you have seen some of the demos probably, what we want to do there and the idea now is that we have a wider involvement in this than just the task force itself and have some of our members, you, please, look at this and use it and play with it a bit with a number of updates until the [unclear] RIPE meeting, after which, we hope we are ready for a production release of the certification software.

Business applications: Also, they used to be our software group. We have changed the way we are working, I might have mentioned that before, and it's actually one of the most loved groups in-house because they do deliver and deliver quickly and work to the users' specifications. It's working quite well and you have heard some issues of, some software deployment there before, and I have listed some more.

Quite a lot of software that we are using is delivered is developed in-house. We see currently a replacement of lots of old stuff. You see that we have, which graphical used interface because it's nice to use, but also a customer relations database, we didn't have that before, we had text files which are simple to use also, you know, but they have other issues.

So a good thing. DNS: K route is running very stabley, it does v6 now as well. I counted them yesterday, I think we have 17 clusters around the world. They have all been upgrade today a new operating system very nicely smoothly. We do social security secretary now in the ENUM zone and you asked us some years ago to phase out the, let's say, richer or affluent ccTLDs with regard to hosting secondary services. We have done so [unclear] this is, might even be the third wave already, starting at the busy end and they do understand and they cooperate very nicely, we don't push them too hard but we are persistent so this is making good progress.

Right. Information services: We had the test traffic task force which has been disbanded at the last RIPE meeting. The plans are the implementation of the plans are going forward: Testing, flexible alarms will be installed, and the full in-depth status you'll see tomorrow, Thursday at the test traffic working group.

Hostcount: Also we are happy that the DIY kit, the kit that enables the ccTLDs so run the Hostcount locally and just deliver us with the results of the data, has been adopted by the UK and Ireland and we hope had a more of them will do it over the rest of the year so that maybe around the next RIPE meeting, the Dubai meeting we can switch off the old Hostcount and run the new version it have alone.

The DNSMON, we do monitor tier one ENUM domains, and also it was quite popular. And the RIS has been upgraded in terms of hardware and runs quickly. My ASN has been updated; we are doing that.

In terms of communications, we have a whole group of people writing a lot. I usually go up and say I need this and that and they go ahead and half a day later I have a paper, sometimes it takes a little bit longer. They also do of course things that you see very prominently, the annual report for last year has been published recently. We do member updates that we send out and of course they are also available on line. It has been published in April, the idea is to get those things out in time, just in time for a RIPE meeting, so it might actually raise some interest in you to come to a RIPE meeting.

Membership survey, I mentioned we want to do that. We are developing that, we are on track there. We also currently help out AfriNIC a little bit. There is an ITU Telecom event in Africa. We have done those together with them and we give them a bit of support there. We do coordinate with the rest of our industry partners, the other RIRs obviously, ISOC and the like, sorry in this case, in the OECD event. Both though guys. I'm talk about this in a minute.

Outreach and external relations: We hear that we should do more and more of this and we do this. We install those RIPE NCC regional meetings quite sometime ago and we regularly go to the Middle East and we regularly go to Moscow because people tell us Moscow is the place to go. And we just came back from Kuwait in April and we will go back again to Moscow in September of this year. We do round tables. We have done one in Amsterdam earlier this year, we will do another one in September. And those as I say, and similar, those are things that take on some popularity and they are invitations from, for instance, the EC, from other countries that we follow and then we meet the guys sometimes new people also to talk about v6, v4, and what's going to happen, how will the end of the world look like and stuff like that.

The OECD will hold a ministerial meeting. That's a fairly big them for them to to. They don't do that often, on the future of the Internet in sole. As I said we coordinate with all our friends and we go there and try to deliver the complexity of the v4 exhaustion and deployment of v6 in basically two words, or two sentences: That is difficult, we need help with that. And the ITU we are friends again, you will remember some years there was some issues with them. They have new leadership and they claim they want to work together with us in a friendly way and we need to liaise and we do that. Now we have the idea jointly to run a workshop between the RIRs and the ITU. The problem is we don't know when. They say early September. We don't have time. So... early planning phase in this one.

Public relations: External relations, I mention that had we need help. We have been asked to position ourselves so that we are known and remembered and accepted as a trusted source for high quality information, neutral information also, on all things to do with Internet numbers and stuff.

We have tried to do that before with moderate success, it just takes a different skill set than what we naturally have to we do get some training and we also hired a PR agency called Race Point and the guys have been here, are still here, just to take in the RIPE meeting and help us, they help us already with the press release that we did on the basis of your statement at the last RIPE meeting. Similar, with AfriNIC there.

Articles, some of the newspapers are in development and do I get regular /TEUFL frequent requests not to talk to journalists and analysts and people who have read the press releases and know about the issues and want to hear from the horse's mouth, but it you will actually turns out to be fun and it works so far. So that's a very good activity. It does cost money but it's well spent, I can say at this time.

And that brings me to the end. If you have any questions, I am happy to answer them and I am sure my colleagues will also try to butt in if I can't give you the answers.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Is there any questions? I actually have two.

The first the person who asked it just left. You said, in the slide you said DNSMON was going to get anycast support but you never elaborated on that. I thought it had any AS support to some extent.

AXEL PAWLIK: Basically we want to be able to see the various instances very clearly in anycast and that's something that we don't have net.

The data will be split. That's a very good feature. The other question I had was on the address reclamation project. Do you think you are getting back another address space? Is it worth it?

Now, what is worth it and what is enough? Basically we want to, we want to gain experience, what happened if we do this as an active activity? And we are gaining that experience. You see what we have done over the course of a year. Is that worth it? I don't know.

AUDIENCE: I understand this cleans the data up. I want to see if you had any other, if you actually thought the amount of address space you were getting back was worth it or you just wanted to clean up the database.

AXEL PAWLIK: It is worth T as we progress, every little bit will help of course. Mainly it is also react to go requests that we actually do this and we have heard some members input on that as well.

CHAIR: Any other questions?

AXEL PAWLIK: There was this issue about the PI contract and fee levels and whether you think that's all appropriate or not, but you can do that in an hour's time.

CHAIR: There was an address policy from this morning there was this question to move proposal

AXEL PAWLIK: 2007-01. I am dreaming about that.

CHAIR: To take some of that into this working group rather than address policy because it's less policy, more

AXEL PAWLIK: Operational, contract issues.

CHAIR: It is concluded in address policy and it has been moved to the working group list for the right working group chair for active discussion going on about what was said about this proposal. I can't sort of have any views of what they will terminate in but we are having a working group share lunch tomorrow and I'm sure this will be discussed then. But if people find it appropriate to for people to bring it back here for discussion in that case? Anyone cares? Anyone opposed?

AUDIENCE: What's the question?

CHAIR: If the proposal comes back for discussion, would you rather it come here than to the Address Policy Working Group?

AXEL PAWLIK: I think what we want to do is report, at least in both, and see what the issues are and whether what the nature of the issue is then possibly and go either there or there, but report in both, I'd say.

CHAIR: Okay. Well let's see after lunch tomorrow what we think the outcome of the proposal is.

Thank you then.

CHAIR: With that I believe we are done here. That was quite fast. So, I am looking at Paul still has five minutes. You have five minutes, if you haven't picked up your nice name tags that look like the other name tag, and the meeting is next door. So we'll see you, the NCC members there in a few minutes then.

I think that's us finished for the time being, is it?