Open Source Working Group Minutes RIPE 84

Wednesday, 18 May 10:30 - 11:30 (UTC+2)
Chairs: Marcos Sanz, Martin Winter, Ondrej Filip
Scribe: Vesna Manojlovic
Status: Final

Agenda: https://ripe84.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/os-wg/ 
Stenographer's notes: https://ripe84.ripe.net/archives/steno/30/

Administrative Matters

Ondrej Filip opened the session and welcomed the new co-chair: Marcos Sanz. The minutes from the previous meeting were approved. He also invited everyone to follow the mailing list, and to start or join the discussions there.

Open Sourcing the RPKI Core

Bart Bakker, RIPE NCC

The presentation is available at: 
https://ripe84.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/30-open-sourcing-RPKI-Core.pdf

This talk covered the reasons for releasing RPKI core source code, the challenges along the way and the RIPE NCC approach. The source code has been offered for a community review, and not with the goal of having everyone run it themselves, nor to accept patches or pull requests. One of the reasons is RIPE NCC’s very high level of transparency. As a first step, security reviews and results were published on the website. Next, internal dependencies had to be replaced with optional files that are available to everyone on GitHub. And finally, instead of publishing a decade’s worth of historical comments, clean version of baseline code was published as a new tree in February. Since then, developers work on the internal repository, but changes are automatically published to the public GitHub repository whenever deployed to production. In addition to this, there are other RPKI projects open-sourced in an easier way: Trust Anchor, Publication Server & “commons Library” software. Bart asked for feedback from the community.

Tim, DE-CIX, asked why the RIPE NCC had decided to keep two separate trees.

Bart said that it was very important to have access to historical comments in the past commits, but not all of those necessarily needed to be made public. Having two trees was a temporary solution which would be revisited in a year.

Five Years of FRRouting

Donatas Abraitis, NetDEF/OpenSourceRouting

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe84.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/53-5-years-of-FRRouting-1.pdf

Donatas works both as a software engineer at NetDEF and as a maintainer for FRR (a free and open-source Internet routing protocol suite for Linux and Unix platforms). He showed the history of releases, number of commits, number of contributors, bugs fixed, features added; introduced several less-known features (Lua hooks, sharpd, Tracing). Donatas invited the working group to join the community and make contributions.

Maria Matejka, Cz.nic, asked if they measured how long it takes to implement Lua bindings. Donatas said that he didn’t know about performance testings.

Peering Manager

Guillaume Mazoyer, PM Lead Developer

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe84.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/52-Peering_Manager_RIPE84_OSS_WG.pdf

Guillaume’s talk was an update on the project that was announced at a RIPE Meeting four years ago, in Marseille — Peering Manager. This is an open-source project, written by engineers for engineers. It integrates with other third-party tools like peeringDB & IX-API.

The goal of the project is to help operate BGP on a day‑to‑day basis: track configuration changes, updating session, deleting sessions, and adding them; eliminate looking at all the YAML and JSON data, and integrate any automation workflow. The list of upcoming features was shown, along with screenshots of the user interface.

Wolfgang Tremmel from DE-CIX Academy, Kostas Zorbadelos from CANAL+ Telecom, and Dan Mahoney from ISC expressed their gratitude for the project and for the efforts of the main developer; they all invited more contributions, either to submit expanse or feature requests with the message “Documentation is the code.”

To conclude, the three co-chairs thanked everyone for their participation.