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Meeting Report

The RIPE 42 Meeting was held at the Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam from 31 April to 3 May 2002. The RIPE 42 Meeting gathered a total of 360 attendees, comprised of the RIPE NCC membership, the RIPE community and representatives from industry bodies and government. The meeting participants also welcomed ARIN and APNIC staff and representatives from ICANN.

The agreement by the RIPE community to the proposed IPv6 allocation policy draft and Stuart Lynn's presentation on ICANN's reform plans made for a memorable event. Stuart Lynn's address to the RIPE 42 participants was attended with great interest and was followed by a lively Q & A. Attendees were actively engaged but no resolutions resulted. However, participants voiced strong disapproval to the reform plan proposed by ICANN. The discussion on ICANN reform was left open and is considered an ongoing issue that requires further input and review.

RIPE 42 was also notable for being held during the week of Queens Day and many attendees took to the streets of Amsterdam to take part in the celebration.

The RIPE NCC acknowledged with appreciation the support of Riverstone Networks, Nominum, CentralNic, Business Internet Trends and Cisco Systems who sponsored the RIPE 42 Meeting.

A summary of the RIPE 42 highlights and actions follow:

REGIONAL INTERNET REGISTRY (RIR) STATISTICS:

The IPv4 allocations for 2001 showed a notable increase in the amount of IPv4 address space allocations in the APNIC service region. The distribution rate of ASN allocations experienced a slight drop, except in the APNIC service region where there was a small increase. As of 29 March 2002, there were a total of 136 IPv6 allocations.

LIR AND INTERNET ADDRESS POLICY ISSUES:

Proposed IPv6 Allocation Policy Draft - ACCEPTED

At the LIR Working Group session, the community accepted the proposed IPv6 allocation policy draft as approved by the other RIRs, APNIC and ARIN. This milestone marks the first address policy adopted by all RIR communities that incorporates all aspects of IPv6 address management approved by all of the RIR communities. The policy proposes a /32 as the default initial allocation size.

Response Time Actions

The RIPE NCC's Registration Services has acknowledged the elevated response time as unacceptable and implemented measures to lessen the response time that include increasing the Hostmaster staff, raising Assignment Windows, improving tools, implementing the /22 criteria, streamlining internal Hostmaster procedures, improving new LIR training, and developing or upgrading RS metrics where needed.

IPv6 Allocations for Root-Name Servers

The proposal on special IPv6 allocations for root-name servers in the RIPE region was accepted as policy: "Under this policy, each (current or future) Internet DNS root server (as listed in the root-servers.net zone) in the RIPE region will be assigned a block of IPv6 address space for purposes of root server operations. The size of the block shall be the same as the size of the minimum allocation to LIRs valid at the time of the root server assignment."

IPv4 Policy Documents

At the LIR Working Group session it was decided to extend the review deadline for the set of draft IPv4 and AS Number policy documents. The draft documents were made available for comments and suggestions until Friday, 17 May 2002.

IPv6 Working Group

The IPv6 Working Group welcomed the consensus by the RIPE community on the proposed IPv6 policy document, "IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Policy Draft".

The IPv6 Promotion Council in Japan gave a presentation demonstrating the deployment of IPv6.

It was clarified at the session that reverse delegation for IPv6 will be made under the ip6.arpa tree. For the time being, ip6.int will be slowly phased out but the same delegation as for ip6.arpa will be made under ip6.int automatically. The RIPE NCC will give a detailed analysis on the status at RIPE 43.

RIPE WHOIS DATABASE:

At the Database Working Group session, it was acknowledged that the "MAIL-FROM:" authentication scheme would be totally deprecated in three months. The same is being considered for "NONE type" authentication. Another authentication type, "CRYPT-MD5" was added that allows longer passwords. There was also a discussion about "hiding" credentials with a "shadow password" concept but no consensus was reached.

Due to high volume of unsolicited emails, ripe-dbm will apply a lightweight anti-spam filter. Mails that do not contain [email protected] in the "To:" or "Cc:" fields will be discarded. Also, in order to increase the quality of service, the ripe-dbm inbox will switch to a ticketing system in which ripe-dbm and users can follow their requests.

It was also noted that while the IRT object has been available since January 2002 and two IRT objects have been registered, further development is needed with the object creation procedure.

ROUTING:

Following a discussion on "Identifying Unallocated Address Space" the Routing Working Group asked the RIPE NCC to make lists of the available unallocated/unassigned address space and to identify the source of such address space by using the RIS.

Other highlights included:

  • The release of a new version of the IRRToolset; the first version after the RIPE NCC assumed maintenance.
  • The functionality of the RRCC prototype.
  • The release of a draft for expanding RPSL to IPv6 ("RPSLng").

DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM:

At the DNS Working Group session, a problem with v6 induced name fragmentation was noted. A situation with IPv6 transport servers may occur where a node is unreachable because the IPv6 client cannot talk to an IPv4 server at a delegation point.

A draft on the use of SRV records to locate Whois servers has been circulated on the mailing list. Contributions to the discussion are requested.

Daniel Karrenberg (RIPE NCC) presented "A Comparison of Answers and Performance Between NSD and Other DNS Server Implementations" that focused on the results of extensive testing performed during the validation and tuning of NSD.

ANTI-SPAM:

At the Anti-Spam Working Group, it was noted that spam is now being used more frequently as a denial of service (DoS) tool.

Patrik Faltstrom of Cisco/IETF has been developing an idea for "signed mail headers" to allow mail servers to simply reject any non-signed (i.e.spam) headers.

TUTORIALS:

The RIPE NCC IP Request Tutorial was again presented at RIPE 42. The tutorial explains address space assignment and allocation procedures in the RIPE NCC service region.

HANDS-ON DEMONSTRATIONS:

The RIPE NCC offered interactive demonstrations of the Test Traffic Measurements service, presenting the operation and benefits of TTM.

The RIPE NCC presented informative one-on-one demonstrations of Routing Information Service (RIS) web-driven services. They also provided insight on how the queries of the RIS Database can be applied in daily operations and troubleshooting from an ISP perspective.

The TTM and RIS demonstrations are scheduled for the RIPE 43 Meeting.

HOSTMASTRE CENTRE:

The RIPE NCC Hostmaster Centre was available during RIPE 42. The centre continues to be a useful facility for the meeting attendees. A Hostmaster Centre will be provided again at RIPE 43.