Experience in the RIPE community, and in the Internet community at large, has shown that certain information and coordination services are needed for the proper functioning of the Internet. This document proposes a way to provide these services to the RIPE community considering its special environment.
This document proposes to create a Network Coordination Center that supports and coordinates the management of a pan European IP network. The proposal also contributes a building block to the global administrative framework of the Internet which is currently being developed (c.f. RFC1174).
The current RIPE structure is very well suited for development type of work. It is less well suited for the day to day work that is of a more administrative nature. These tasks should be handled by a dedicated technical staff
that form the RIPE Network Coordination Center (NCC).
In accordance with the RIPE Terms of Reference, the main objective of the RIPE NCC is to give support to the networking organisations that cooperate in RIPE.
The RIPE NCC does not provide end user support services. Also network operation functions will not be provided by the RIPE NCC as these functions are performed by the network operation staffs of the RIPE member organisations. The RIPE NCC will however provide the necessary support and coordination to enable the RIPE member NOC staffs to provide these services. The Network Coordination Center is 'embedded' in RIPE:
There are three distinct classes of tasks or functions foreseen for the NCC:
1. registry function
2. network information management
3. general RIPE support function
The RIPE NCC will function as a `Delegated Registry' for IP numbers in Europe, as anticipated and defined in RFC 1174. The NCC keeps the register of IP numbers and AS numbers for the RIPE member organisations. This will mean that the NCC allocates blocks of numbers to local registers in Europe. The local registers inherit the responsibility to supply the accompanying information. It remains the responsibility of the NCC to collect this locally gathered information, and make it globally available. The local registries are set up by RIPE member organisations as appropriate. Particular requests that can not be catered for by local registries will be handled by the NCC. The NCC has to coordinate closely and meet periodically with the Internet registry.
The NCC keeps a database of information describing at least the following objects:
Only those associated with an object of the previous classes. A general white pages service is not forseen.
The NCC is responsible for four types of information exchange:
Organisations outside the RIPE domain specifically include the Internet Registry and other outside NIC's and NOC's. The RIPE NCC will be the only source of authoritative information from the RIPE world. The NCC will provide tools to RIPE member organisations to interrogate the network information databases. The network information databases kept by the NCC will also be available for the RARE community at large and other interested parties. OSI based tools for general access to the databases should be supported.
Privacy aspects of keeping personal information in publicly accessible databases will be carefully studied by the NCC in the context of the prevailing European laws. As a minimum safeguard against unsolicited violations of privacy, individual permission for keeping personal data in the database will be a requirement.
The following tasks have been defined as valuable support functions for the
operation centers of the networks cooperating within RIPE:
These tasks must be performed in close cooperation with the RIPE membership.
The following requirements for the running of the RIPE NCC have been identified: