RIPE 43 Meeting

The European Operators Forum (EOF) is a forum where new technology developments of interest to IP network operators are presented and discussed. The EOF has no formal charter or chair. The agenda is coordinated by a programme committee led by Rob Blokzijl, RIPE Chair.

Participation is open to all interested parties. The EOF is normally a day and a half session that takes place prior to scheduled Working Group meetings. The Programme Committee welcomes input for possible topics and can be reached at eof-coord@ripe.net.

Tutorials and Presentations

Monday 9 September 2002:

10.00 - 12.30 RPSL (Andy Linton)

Andy Linton has recently been working on contract for APNIC on their pilot RPSL-based services that should recently have replaced the current RIPE version 2 servers and is currently working on the design and build of an IP wireless network for use in rural New Zealand.

He has worked in New Zealand as Chief IP Engineer for Netlink and TelstraSaturn and IP Network Architect for Xtra and in Australia as a Network Engineer for connect.com.au and AARNet.

As Internet backbone connectivity becomes more complex, it becomes more difficult to keep track of peering policies with providers and customers.
By specifying routing details using RPSL in the public Internet Routing Registry (IRR) providers can use the information to check consistency and build router configurations.

This tutorial will introduce RPSL concepts, describe use of automated tools such as RtConfig to build router configurations and use a case study to examine the benefits of converting from manual configuration of BGP peering policy on routers.

14.00 - 17.00 Evaluate network performance with Cisco Service Assurance Agent (SAA) (Emmanuel Tychon)

Emmanuel Tychon is now an employee of Cisco Systems based in Brussels.
After successive positions in the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) in various fields like Architecture, Security and broadband IP aggregation, he moved to a very specialized testing group and is now working as a Software Engineer.

SAA is an IOS embedded feature for the testing of network and application performance. This presentation's objective is to show an overall of what can be done with Cisco IOS SA Agent. Implementation details will be provided about the mechanisms used for the different
measurements.

Correctly used, we will show how this feature can help Service Providers to facilitate their day-to-day network planning and performance management.

SA Agent - Introduction

• Objectives

SA Agent - Configuration Methods

• Via CLI
• Via SNMP
• Backend Applications

SA Agent - a Look Inside

• Layer-3 (IP) Operations
• The SAA Control Protocol
• UDP Operation
• TCP Operation
• Jitter Operation
• HTTP Operation
• Other Operations [DNS, DHCP,...]
• Layer-2 (ATM) Operations
• SLM is SLA for L2 ATM
• ATM performance evaluation

Examples Scenarios

• Latency measurement
• Jitter measurement on a differentiated services network
• TOS marking
• SAA deployment in an MPLS/VPN network
  
• Without shadow routers
  
• With shadow routers

Standards

• SAA positioning with established standards
• Proprietary part of SAA

Tuesday 10 September 2002

9.00-12.30 MPLS (Kireeti Kompella)

Kireeti Kompella is a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks. His current interests are all aspects of Multi-Protocol Label Switching, including traffic engineering, generalized MPLS, and MPLS applications such as VPNs. Kompella is active at the IETF, where he is a co-chair of
the CCAMP Working Group and the author of several Internet-Drafts in the areas of IS-IS, MPLS, OSPF, PPVPN and TE. Previously, he worked in the area of file systems at Network Appliance and SGI.

Kompella received his B.S. in EE and M.S. in C.S. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur; and his Ph.D. in C.S. at the University of Southern California.

This tutorial discusses several types of failure that routers must deal with, including link failures, node (router) failures, and protocol (control plane) failures. It goes on to discuss various solutions to these problems, some involving new protocols (such as MPLS "fast reroute" and fast liveness detection) and others involving modifications to existing protocols (faster convergence of IGPs,
graceful restart).

For current issues, please turn to the EOF mailing list archives at:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail-archives/eof-list/index.html

More information about this working group is located at:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/wg/eof/index.html