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Minutes

Chair: Rob Blokzijl
Scribe: Sylvana Wenderhold

1. Opening and welcome

RIPE Chair Rob Blokzijl welcomed the participants to the RIPE 36 meeting.

2. The agenda

Agenda item 5 was shifted to a later time, as Mike Norris had not yet arrived.

3. Minutes from RIPE 35

The minutes were approved.

4. From the Chair

Rob thanked Matav and Matav net very much for providing the connectivity for  the meeting. He also thanked Elender for the computers supplied in the  terminal room.

The Chair urged participants to clearly state their names and use the microphone when asking questions.

Louis Touton addressed the audience concerning the ICANN Independent Review Panel Nominating Committee. This Nominating Committee consists of two individuals appointed by the ICANN Address Council, along with two by the ICANN Names Council and two by the ICANN Protocol Council. The Address Council has been asked to identify its two appointments and is seeking recommendations from the community.

The Nominating Committee to which appointments are being made is responsible for nominating the members of the ICANN Independent Review Panel, which addresses complaints from the community that ICANN is violating its bylaws, etc. Members of the Independent Review Panel should be current or retired judges, or people with the legal training to be judges. Since those serving on the Independent Review Panel will not be compensated, the Nominating Committee members appointed by the Address Council should be situated to persuade well-qualified individuals to volunteer to serve on the Independent Review Panel. Thus, ideal appointments to the Nominating Committee would be those people who know judges. One important condition is that the people appointed cannot be directly involved with the ICANN process (i.e. they cannot be ICANN Directors, staff, or advisors, members of the Address Council, etc.).

5. News from ICANN

Mike Norris informed the audience about the ICANN At Large structure and the ASO. The ASO is well represented with Hans Petter Holen, Wilfried Woeber and Sabine Jaume from this region together with three members from the Americas and three from the Asia Pacific region. Rob Blokzijl sits on the board of ICANN itself. ICANN board elections are coming up in November. Registration is open to anyone. Mike would like to see more people register for the At Large membership.

For information about ICANN and the elections please visit: http://www.icann-ineurope.org

Mike Roberts (President and CEO)

Rob was proud to introduce Mike Roberts who was one of the highest ICANN officials ever to visit a RIPE Meeting.

Mike Roberts provided a few words of where ICANN is today and where it is going. He explained that ICANN is a product of one of the Internet's many scaling crises, in fact created as a result of the major success of the Internet. He enlightened the audience with some background information about how ICANN was established as a non-profit corporation independent from the US government. It has become a very diversified organisation with an international perspective. The goal is an independent ICANN with very little government involvement.

Mike Roberts pointed out three difficult issues for ICANN at this time:

  1. Manner in which new generic top level domain should be introduced. The question is not should there be more, but under what circumstances and conditions should there be more.
  2. Revisions to RFC 1591 ICP 1. (Domain Name System Structure and Delegation) This deals with the relationship between the US government and the top level domain administrators.These relationships need to be formalised.
  3. Internet addressing should receive as much attention as the names issue has received.

6. Reports from the RIPE NCC

Axel Pawlik provided the RIPE NCC status report:

His presentation focused on three main areas:

  • Services
  • Co-ordination
  • RIPE NCC Priorities

Registration Services: The workload around the allocation of IPv4 addresses is constantly increasing. Still there was good news; the wait queue is down to five days from seven days.

IPv6: The revision of the policy document is still ongoing.

Membership: A milestone of 2000 members has been reached. The membership is constantly increasing at a rate larger than expected.

New members per region 1999: Europe 258 (551), Middle East, 8 (31), Africa 3 (8)

Number of requests: This year the number of requests has not dropped under 1600 per month.

RIPE NCC Hostcount: It is beyond 11.000.000 after the first quarter of this year.

RIPE Database: There was a problem with the database in March. It was down for five hours. Updates were kept aside and handled later. There was a small incident the day before the RIPE 36 plenary session. However, in the event of such occurrences the spare server takes over, so these problems will go unnoticed in the future.

Data protection: A lot of data is protected. PGP is the most secure way to protect data, yet only two percent is protected using PGP. Axel encouraged the members to start using PGP, particularly as it is offered for free. At the next RIPE meeting there will be additional effort to promote this mechanism.

Database reimplementation: The project is nearly finished. Currently we have a server prototype. The RIPE NCC has set up a test database for users of the RIPE database to send trial updates to.

External Communications:

  • RIPE NCC Annual Report 1999
    The 1999 Annual Report has been sent to members. Copies are available at the RIPE NCC
  • RIPE NCC awareness
    RIPE NCC receives many invitations to give presentations and participate in panels. The RIPE NCC has also been busy meeting with various new players in the industry.
  • New LIR course material successfully introduced
    The first five courses taught with the new material have been very well received.

Locations for upcoming LIR Training Courses (courses up to September will be held in):

  • Athens
  • Prague
  • Amsterdam
  • Riyadh
  • Madrid
  • Geneva
  • Paris
  • Berlin
  • Vienna

New projects:

  • Routing Information Service (RIS)
  • Test Traffic Measurements (TTM)
  • Moving from an experimental project to a regular service
  • Preparing roll out the next series of test-boxes
  • Improving and adding components based on the TTM data

Regional Internet Registry (RIR) Coordination:

  • RIR retreat
  • Attended ARIN, APRICOT and AfriNIC meetings

Axel welcomed the various members of the other RIRs at the RIPE 36 meeting in Budapest. He reported that the coordination between the RIRs has been very successful so far.

RIRs have decided to split on a split of the total amount of the contribution toward ICANN's first financial year that comes to an end at the end of June 2000. (RIPE NCC: 50%, ARIN: 35%, APNIC, 25%)

The Address Supporting Organisation (ASO) general assembly meeting is gathering for the first time after the RIPE meeting in Budapest on Friday, 19 May 2000. Axel invited the RIPE NCC membership to join the meeting.

RIPE NCC Priorities:

  • Continuing to ensure and further improve stable, reliable and high quality services
    The wait queue is down. However, the RIPE NCC will continue to work towards getting the queue down to a level that is acceptable to all members.
  • Respond to members' needs and develop and propose services as needed
  • Further increase RIPE NCC and RIPE awareness

Question from Christian Panigl: Why does the RIPE NCC fund 50% of the ICANN-ASO budget intended for RIRs and ARIN only 35%?

Axel: This is the first year's split between the registries. We have looked at the degree of establishment, budget and turnover. These numbers point to this split.

Rob: The money comes from the RIPE NCC budget and has been approved by the membership.

Axel introduces Joao Silva Damas who presented a proposal to revise the RIPE document store. Most  documents are fairly static and do not require frequent updating. Some however, change frequently (policies and procedures document, the request forms etc.). If they are referenced in other documents and the document number changes, these documents need to be updated as well. This requires a lot of work.

It would make it easier if the numbers would remain the same. Joao proposes to have an option to freeze the number of certain documents (the ones that change frequently).

After lively discussion it was decided to keep the system as it is and review the RIPE NCC's internal procedures on document revision. Later a detailed proposal will be presented to the RIPE community. Generally there was agreement that more active use of the document titles rather than its numbers would make referencing these documents easier.

7. Reports from ARIN, APNIC, AfirNIC and LacNIC

ARIN (Richard Jimmerson)

Richard Jimmerson introduced himself as the Registration Services Manager at ARIN.

Structure of ARIN:

  • currently 1001 members
  • six board of trustees members
  • advisory committee of 15 members
  • president
  • executive assistant
    • four divisions
      1. registration services group
      2. member services division
      3. engineering division
      4. administration division

ARIN currently has 23 staff members. ARIN activities are very much the same as other RIRs.

Some highlights from the presentation:

  • Fees revised for registration category level upgrades
    ARIN no longer bills for upgrades. ARIN will now invoice the organisation at the new registration category level on their next anniversary date.
  • Maximum allocation size increased to /13
    A handful of organisations outgrew the /14. To meet their requirements, the maximum allocation size has been increased to /13.
  • Postal address for residential reassignments may be omitted Individuals with a /29 or smaller still need to be listed in the ARIN database, but instead of listing the postal address they now use the ISP contact information.
  • ARIN training soon to be offered

ARIN does not offer training, but will soon be offering training within their region on a request basis.

One difference with the RIPE NCC is that ARIN issues address space based on an organisation's three month needs instead of a one year need. They require members to gives updates on their address space every three months. ARIN then reserves address space for one year. If the organisation does not need this space within one year, it will be allocated to another organisation.

ARIN has a registration services helpdesk and saw a 74% increase in the number of phone calls received in the last year. The type of phone calls received are from people who need help filling out templates, and have questions about policies, guidelines and criteria.

ARIN has received 6 requests for IPv6 allocation. They have approved and allocated 4 at this time.

ARIN priorities:

  • Development of new tools to aid hostmasters in daily activities
  • Developments of external training materials
  • Increase level of customer service

ARIN staff visits many meetings and conferences to increase awareness about their organisation.

Questions:

Jeroen Bet: How does ARIN ensure quality of customer services?

Richard: We looks at the quality of mail that has been sent out. We also look at the performance of the individual hostmasters. Sometimes members are approached to discuss any problems.

APNIC (Paul Wilson)

  • APNIC staff has doubled in the last year. They have 16 staff at present but will grow to 21.
  • Almost doubled the membership. APNIC experienced a decrease growth during the Asia crisis, but now records are broken monthly in terms of membership growth.
  • They have issued an equivalent /8 in the last 16 months of operation. Allocation rate is picking up dramatically.
  • Paul explained that they align their charging model to the number of allocations to an organisation. This would naturally place the organisations into the small/ medium/ large/ very large categories.

APNIC in 2000.

  • Software automation
  • to support resource and allocation processes
  • Customer support
  • help desk and member care programme
  • Documentation
  • improved user interface
  • on-line help with forms
  • translation of core documents

Overall, all aspects of APNIC are clearly growing.


APNIC meeting will take place 25-27 October, 2000 in Brisbane, Australia. APNIC welcomes all who are interested to participate in the APNIC meeting.

Questions:

Question: How many IPv6 allocation requests has APNIC received?
Paul: We have had 14 requests, and allocated 12 subTLAS so far. Japan is very active in the IPv6 community. There has been a Chinese request as well and we expect a lot more requests in the future.

AfriNIC (Antony Brooks)

In his presentation, Ant Brooks elaborated on the challenges AfriNIC is facing. Despite a consensus in Africa about the establishment of AfriNIC, it has been difficult to realise any concrete structure. 1999 was the year of anti-progress. Among the reasons were the fact that they didn't have market representation and none of the submissions for a host country was workable. Particularly disastrous was the pull out of South Africa from the process, as 80% of the Internet activity is located in South Africa.

Another problem has been the language barrier. There has been some Francophone and Anglophone tension in the region. This problem seems to have been solved now as much attention is given to simultaneous translation in French and English.

Gladly, in 2000 there has been a great deal of progress. A lot of effort has been made to get South Africa involved once again. At the recent conference in Cape Town, AfriNIC reached a breakthrough. There was both strong geographic and market representation. The RIRs were all represented at the conference, leading to a warm support of AfriNIC.

Where is AfriNIC today?

  • Structure
    Bylaws accepted by principle
    Membership structure (voluntary)
    Board of Trustees
    Executive staff
    Funding model (but without figures)
  • Representation
    Interim Board of Trustees accepted
    ASO observer selected (Antony Brooks)
    Two listeners chosen (Mouhamet Diop, Nii Quaynor)
  • Working groups
    BoT advisory committee
    Policy working group

Antony pointed out that the only way AfriNIC would become a success is by creating stability. He explained that large ISPs worry about the success of AfriNIC specifically because they are concerned about the lack of stability as a regional registry. Small ISPs on the other hand, worry about the minimum allocations. Not many organisations need large allocations at this point in time.

There is a propsal to have the initial AfriNIC staff be located at the RIPE NCC premises. This would ensure the desired stability as it offers both technical and financial solidity. The other RIRs strongly advise against the suggestion ofmultiple locations for the office in Africa.

  • Possible pit-falls
    Lack of a clear path to the final goal
    Financial viability
    Taking Africans out of Africa (there are not enough skilled people in
    the region)

http://www.afrinic.org

LacNIC (German Valdez)

Due to German's late arrival, this presentation did not take place. German gave his presentation at the ASO meeting (Friday, 19 May 2000 in Budapest). Please see the ASO Meeting minutes when they become available on:

http://www.aso.icann.org

8. New developments in transatlantic cable systems

(Daniele Bovio)

9. Reports from the Working Groups

Database Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 36

48 participants
Scribe: Nigel Titley
Chair: Wilfried Woeber

Wilfried will receive help from Nigel Titley and Ulf Kieber with the working group in the future. Nigel will take care of the PR part of it and Ulf will help co-ordinate the working group. The chair has received approval from the working group on this issue.

Reports from RIPE NCC:

  • Operational update
  • Software re-implementation

Report form APNIC by Paul Wilson:

  • CA activities, (ask for representation)

Results and actions:

  • To work even more closely with CENTR to move the domain data to their own database. Ask CENTR to present a progress report regularly.
  • To arrange for a digital signature and certification course / workshop for RIPE 37
  • Activity plan for RIPE NCC in 2001
    Input from other working groups is welcomed

EIX "exchange" object => propsosal invited

- Use of XML (for a common report template) => proposal invited

There were no questions.

IPv6 Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 36

75 participants
Scribe: Jeroen Bet
Chair: David Kessens

A tutorial was given on Tuesday in addition to the regular working group meeting. It was very well attended. Participants had a chance to try IPv6 demo in terminal room. David reported on 6Bone developments.

Status of IPv6 Allocation Guideline draft
End-user assignments:

It is currently discussed on which boundary end-user assignments should be made.

Action on David: Summarise pro/cons to the findings and discussions and concerns brought forward to the list.

There were no questions.

LIR Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 36

101 participants
Scribe: Eamonn McGuiness
Chair: Hans Petter Holen

Wait Queue

  • Nurani and Joao presented substantial plans to improve the current situation
  • The wait queue is now down to eight days
  • The goal is to bring the queue down to two days
  • In order to complement the internal process a Task Force was formed comprised of members of the LIR WG.

This task force will gather comment from the community on:

  • metrics such as the best possible delay
  • broken parts in the current process and policies
  • ways to improve communication flow

They will report back to the working group in a short and clear document and deliver this to the RIPE NCC as input for the processes and policies review.

Pre RIR address space

  • as a follow up question to the ARIN presentation the question on how to deal with address space predating the RIRs was raised.
  • The RIRs have a project to distribute the address space to the appropriate registry.

Minimum allocation size
Consensus on changing policy to:

  • The minimum allocation size will be /20
  • Not before 01 August 2000
  • Identify allocation size on RIPE address blocks and publish in a machine readably format by 15 June 2000

Hans Petter also provided a glance at the agenda of the upcoming LIR working group in Amsterdam.

There were no questions.

Netnews Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 36

13 participants
Scribe: Felix Kugler
Chair: Dave Wilson

Two excellent presentations were given:
Daniel Diaz (NHNS)
Kai Siering (Flowmaps)

The agenda for RIPE 37 will be very similar to the one for RIPE 36.
The actions are being worked on.

There were no questions.

Anti-Spam Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 36

Approximately 25 participants
Scribe: Maldwyn Morris
Chair: Rodney Tillotson

Update spam:

  • I love you - not spam
  • Greeting card spam
  • Collateral spam

-Anti-spam ORBS discredited
-Legislation EC directives, some opt-ins

Codes of conduct - RIPE-206 well-received

  • BCP on opt-in lists
  • AUPs; new end users, different expectations
  • ISPs support their customers

Technical Measure

  • filtering products and services

Interaction with CERTS

  • Advice on responses
  • Reading mail (headers?)

Next agenda will be similar.

There were no questions.

DNR Working Group

Participants: ?
Scribe: Sharon Bush
Chair: Kevin Meynell (in absence of Fay Howard)

New members (now 30 + 2 associates)

  • Croatia .hr
  • Russia .ru
  • Japan .jp (associate member)

ccTLD Funding of ICANN

  • ccTLDs required to pay 35% of 99/00 budget ($1.49m)
  • ICANN proposing 'domain name based split'
  • CENTR Excom advocating fee bands - discussion ongoing
  • Formalisation of relationship between ICANN/cc TLDs required

Kevin elaborated on some results from the DNSSEC working group meeting.

Common Registration Templates

  • Supported by some (all?) registrars
  • XML?
  • CENTR collecting templates to determine commonalties

Neteka

  • Developed as alternative to BIND
  • Supports multi-lingual character sets
  • Software for associated services (e.g. mail)
  • http://www.neteka.com/.

Russian ccTLD

  • operated by RosNIIROS
  • Registration Policies
  • Fees

DNR Forum Activities

Common Template Task Force

  • Feasibility of common templates
  • Format (e.g. XML)

Data Protection

  • Examine zone file access
  • Document uses (e.g. statistics, host count, searching)
  • Work in conjunction with CENTR Legal Forum

New Chairperson

Two individuals have come forward to chair the next meeting. For now at least it will be on a meeting by meeting basis. The two people are Hans Nicklasson  from Swip.net and Mally McLane from Planet Online. Sharon Bush from NetNames has offered to be the Secretary for the next meeting.

Comment from Mike Roberts about the ICANN funding. He emphasised that ICANN is not a governmental authority. The proposed ccTLD allocations are not a tax.

Kevin answered that the proposed model is not the way forward according to many ccTLDs, specifically in CENTR.

Rob said he experienced a 'déjà vu' looking back at when the RIPE NCC had just started. The outcome for the RIPE NCC is a mixture between the two models.

There were no questions.

Routing Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 36

70 participants
Scribe: Marek Bukowy
Tutor: Stefano Previdi (Cisco)
Chair: Joachim Schmitz

During RIPE 36 there was a Multicast Routing Tutorial with 30 participants. Wilfried Woeber felt the tutorial was a big success.  ftp://ftpeng.cisco.com/ipmulticast

The Routing working group was a bit shorter as usual, as some speeches had  been cancelled.

Update to RIPE-178 (C. Panigl)

Transition to RPSL (Andrei)

  • close to finish reimplemention
  • Phase II to start end of June
  • Extensive testing - call for testers

RIS - Status and plans (A. Antony)

  • http://www.ripe.net/ris
  • test prototype available
  • investigating issues around production

Actions

31.R1 on RIPE NCC, D. Kessens and J. Schmitz
Basic design for an IPv6 IRR
-postponed-

32R1 on RIPE NCC, JLS.Damas
Prepare draft document on issues of RIPE-181 to RPSL transition
- in progress -

34.R1 on C.Panigl
For RPSL assure mirror/whois capability with RADB
- new -

Draft Agenda RIPE 37

RPSL transition, phase III
RIS, BGP anomalies, ...

There were no questions.

EIX

Minutes: RIPE 36

52 participants
Scribe: Henk Uijterwaal
Chair: Fearghas McKay

IX reports

  • Sfinx
  • Amsix
  • Linx
  • Vix
  • Hamburg

RIPE Activity Plan
Database object for IXs
Peering contact attribute for AS
Allocated IP address range
BCP -for IX operations- Nic Lewis
Tools List

Peering tree decision paper

Switching wish list - Mike Hughes

EIX Ops list

Action Items:

  • Present proposal to DB working group
  • BCP - process underway
  • Tools - needs a co-ordinator
  • Wish list - process underway

Invited IX members to come and share their experiences.

Keith Mitchell noted that there are now work items within the working group.  We may need to revisit the charter as it says that there will be no work items.

There were no questions.

DNS Working Group

98 participants
Scribe: Vesna Manojlovic
Chair: Ruediger Volk

David Conrad: BIND 9

Bill Manning: Whiter DNS ?
Preparing for DNS evolution

Stable specifications / stable code ensure feedback operational => Protocol designer communities

NL netlab/CENTR DNSSEC workshop

Paper on moving domain delegation

There were no questions.

Test Traffic Working Group

Minutes: RIPE 36

Approximately 30 participants
Scribe: Rene Wilhelm
Chair: Matthew Robinson

There was a presentation by Henk.

A paper should be produced about the test traffic project and a table of contents will be available and sent to the mailing list soon.

The test traffic project is becoming self sufficient in terms of funding.

There is now a contest to produce a new logo and name (instead of ' I'm a member of the test traffic project') for the test traffic web pages. Matthew will present a prize to the winner at RIPE 37. More information about this can be found in the Test Traffic WG meeting minutes when they become available.

There were no questions.

10. Next RIPE meetings

  • RIPE 37 Amsterdam 12-15 September, 2000
  • RIPE 38 Amsterdam 23-26 January, 2001
  • RIPE 39 Bologna May, 2001

Geza thanked the audience for coming to Budapest. He invited everyone to join him on a walking tour of the city on Saturday.

11. AOB

There was no other business to discuss.

12. Close

Rob took the opportunity to thank the local hosts in Budapest, Geza Turchanyi of Matav, Hungary and Balazs Martos chairman of Hungarian Internet Providers' Council.

Rob thanked everyone for attending and hopes to meet all the participants again at the next RIPE Meeting in Amsterdam on 12-15 September, 2000.