Connect Working Group Minutes RIPE 86
Thursday, 25 May 2023, 11:00 - 12:30 (UTC+2)
Chairs: Florence Lavroff, Remco van Mook, Will van Gulik
Scribe: Martin Pels
Status: Final
View the stenography transcripts
1. Opening
Remco van Mook
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe86.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/125-Connect-WG-86-Final_final_verified_version2_ok.pdf
Remco opened the session.
2. Housekeeping
Remco introduced his co-chairs Florence and Will and presented the agenda. The minutes from RIPE 85 were approved.
3. Mapping the Geography of Data in Central Asia: A View From Within
Louis Pétiniaud, Geode
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe86.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/116-2023-06-Slides-Rotterdam2-Louis-Petiniaud.pdf
Louis explained the mapping methodologies used (physical infrastructure, BGP feeds, RIPE Atlas) and how they augmented this with field work (interviewing local stakeholders and performing on-site traceroute measurements).
Carsten Schiefner, All Things Internet, asked whether the operators were predominantly state-run or private?
Louis replied saying they were only private operators.
Urban Suhadolnik, TU Graz asked what the alternatives were to connectivity via Russia.
Louis said that Chinese alternatives were not suitable at present. Railroads are being built, so this may change, but the quality of the networks in the western part of China is not good.
Urban asked if he found anything about connections south towards Iran, or through the Caspian Sea towards Azerbaijan?
Louis answered that there were plans, but funding was required
4. Introducing a Common Policy for the Use of IRR DB by IXP Route Servers
Stavros Konstantaras, AMS-IX
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe86.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/109-Proposal_Connect_WG_V1.pdf
Stavros presented work by several IXPs on creating a common policy for where route server participants should publish their filtering rules.
Q Misell, AS207960, asked what consideration had been given to legacy space and amateur radio space.
Stavros said that they found that they do not peer with route servers. If IXPs consistently followed this policy then something could happen.
Radu-Adrian Feurdean, France-IX, asked if it would be good to have all operators take part in this initiative and not just IXPs.
Stavros agreed with Radu.
Will van Gulik remarked that this was indeed the plan and that some big operators were already doing this.
Radu stated that the IRR DB can be explicitly mentioned in PeeringDB as an optional field.
Job Snijders, Fastly, remarked that it was good to realise that some RIRs only recently started IRRs, for instance LACNIC started an IRR based on RPKI only two or three years ago, making these policies possible. He added that IRR databases have increased in recent years thanks to community efforts. He encouraged everyone to run some measurements to understand the impact on their filters and added that he wanted to sleep in on 1 January so a different cut-off date would be appreciated.
Antoin Verschuren, Liberty Global, said that he supported this proposal, that everybody should do this and not just IXPs.
Tim Wattenberg, DE-CIX, asked how Stavros came up with the four alternative IRRs supported during the grace period.
Stavros said they looked at existing route server peers on IXPs and decided to support the most-used ones. AltDB only has a small number of users at about 1%.
Rüdiger Volk, no affiliation, said that RPSL does not tell you in which sequence the databases should be searched. You know the first, not the order after that. Please also use ROAs as additional source.
Alexander Azimov, Yandex, asked how the system solve issues connected to object transfers between RIRs and also for ASNs.
The Chairs recommended continuing the discussion after the session.
Alexander asked if the Working Group was trying to write best practices within RIPE policy.
Will replied that the aim was to publish a document and suggest a way for the community to do things, and that the kind of document had not been fixed upon.
Alexander said that the IETF might be a better place to share best common practice.
Benjamin Collet, F5, thanked Stavros for the presentation. He said they had been encouraging customers to draw up authoritative databases also because transit providers also have hard deadline to drop support for unauthenticated databases. One of the biggest problems they face is that their customers rely on third parties to create proxy registrations in the databases and don’t manage their own entries.
Stavros said he was aware that this was an issue but this is something that should already have been done for a while now and if all IXPs follow the same policy then they would all benefit.
Benjamin said that he was concerned that the transition timeline is a bit short for big organisations.
Stavros replied that the deadline has been proposed but is up for discussion. He said there was a lot of support for the policy and it was a community effort. He suggested continuing the discussion over the mailing list.
5. Lightning Talk About Accra-IX
Silas Peprah, PAIX (online)
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe86.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/66-230416-Accra-IX-Presentation-RIPE-86-FN.pdf
Silas described the development of the Internet in Ghana, and introduced Accra-IX.
There were no questions.
6. PeeringDB Update
Leo Vegoda, PeeringDB
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe86.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/19-20230525_RIPE86_Leo_Vegoda.pptx.pdf
Leo shared an administrative and technical update of what has been happening at PeeringDB.
Nurani Nimpuno, LINX asked if the campus category was self defined.
Leo said that if you are in facility A that is owned by the same organisation as facility B and you can cross-connect, it is a campus. PeeringDB doesn’t vet the data heavily but if organisations misrepresent themselves, the community of PeeringDB users are likely to notice it.
Nurani asked whether they have an outreach effort to data centres who run campuses and might not be aware that they need to add that a record.
Leo replied that they had written a blog post, shared it on social media and he had spoken to individuals. Speaking at events such as that session was part of it, but they didn’t have budget for advertising so to please spread the word.
Blake Willis, Zayo, thanked Leo for the carrier and campus initiatives.
7. Euro-IX Update
Bijal Sanghani, Euro-IX
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe86.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/137-RIPE86-3.pdf
Bijal gave updates about Euro-IX and several of their members, IXPDB and Peering Toolbox
There were no questions.
8. Closing
Remco reminded everyone to rate the talks and closed the session.