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Meeting Report

The RIPE 44 Meeting was held recently at the Krasnapolsky Hotel from 27-31 January 2003 in Amsterdam. There were a total of 360 attendees comprised of the RIPE NCC membership, the RIPE community and government representatives. Attendees also included representatives from APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, and ICANN.

Members from the U.K. had the highest number of representatives (53), followed by Germany (50), the Netherlands (37) and the U.S.A (42). Additionally, there were more representatives from Eastern European countries than ever before.

Highlights of RIPE 44 included the open discussion during the Plenary on the RIPE NCC 2002 membership survey results, the first report by LACNIC after being granted official RIR status, and the first webcasting trial of the RIPE 44 sessions held in the Grand Ballroom.

Version 1.0 of the RIPE NCC LIR Portal was also showcased at RIPE 44. Portal features and benefits were noted at a presentation given at the LIR and Tools Working Groups' sessions.

The RIPE NCC would like to thank SURFnet, Afilias, NIKHEF, KPN EuroRings, and AMSIX for the support they provided to the meeting. A summary of the RIPE 44 highlights follows:

LIR

  • Denesh Bhabuta (Aexiomus Limited) stepped down as co-chair of the LIR Working Group. Gert Döring (SpaceNet) and Andrea Borgato (I.Net S.p.A.) were selected as new co-chairs.
  • A search for a new name for the LIR Working Group was started. Rob Blokzijl (RIPE Chair) will publish a proposal for a new name.
  • The LIR Working Group Chairs will draft a new charter for the working group. The sub-allocation policy document was approved. No changes were made.
  • A task force and mailing list was formed to investigate changes to the PI policy.
  • The RIPE NCC was tasked to publish a draft document on status values in inetnum objects.

DATABASE

  • IPv6 support for querying the Whois Database has been implemented.
  • References by name have been cleaned from the database and an "organisation:" object was proposed.
  • The RIPE NCC was tasked to:
    • document the mirroring protocol and its operational requirements.
    • add inverse lookups to all attributes that have integrity constraints.
    • propose and implement "reclaim:"-like functionality to the database.
    • add contact data to key-cert objects.

IPv6

  • Enhanced IPv6 support for the new IPv6 Whois proxy has been implemented.
  • Test Traffic Measurement test-boxes now fully support IPv6.
  • Gert Döring (SpaceNet) proposed discussions to enable IPv6 access to the root servers and AAAA records for TLD in the root zone.
  • Bernard Tuy (RENATER) was tasked to co-ordinate an IPv6 routing guideline document.
  • The RIPE NCC was tasked to:
    • enable reverse delegation for 6bone under ip6.arpa.
    • investigate increasing the size of RIR allocations to rationalise routing with the IANA.

ROUTING

  • Joao Silva Damas (ISC) was announced as co-chair of the Routing Working Group. A second co-chair is being sought.
  • The Routing Registry Consistency Check utility implemented by the RIPE NCC was finalised. The source code is available on the RIPE NCC ftp server at: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/software/RRCC-0.2.tar.gz
  • A list of IP address space allocated by the RIPE NCC, useful for filtering unallocated address space on routers, was published on the RIPE NCC ftp server at: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/stats/issued/
  • As a part of the RIS Beacon Project the RIPE NCC was tasked to look into the behaviour of a second BGP announcement whilst the first one has not yet converged.
  • The RIPE NCC was tasked to analyse RIS data to approximate how much of the Internet is seen by RIS route collectors.

DNS

  • Johan Ihren (Autonomica AB) presented a proposal for experimentally signing the root-zone. The RIPE NCC was tasked to discuss the idea with the RIRs and propose technical and political recommendations.
  • Andrei Robachevsky (RIPE NCC) presented a report on IPv6-related DNS issues. The RIPE NCC requests feedback on freezing delegations in the ip6.int space, reverse 6to4 delegations and support of 6bone space reverse delegations under ip6.arpa.

TTM & RESEARCH

  • A new Chair is being sought for the Test Traffic Working Group.
  • Test Traffic Measurement test-boxes now fully support IPv6, making TTM the first measurement product on the market to do so.
  • CDMA is now fully supported as an alternative clock source.
  • Mailing list discussions have begun on upgrading TTM to the IPv6 version as well as on new business models for TTM.

TECHSEC

  • Erik Rozendaal (NLnet Labs) presented a new project at NLnet Labs called “Donkey”. It intends to provide a general purpose distributed public key database.

ANTI-SPAM

  • More spam problems with proxies than open relays were reported.
  • Assured Path Messaging was noted as a possible alternative e-mail service.

PRESENTATIONS

  • SQL Slammer Worm Attack / Rene Wilhelm (RIPE NCC)
    Analysis of data collected around the time of this attack, showing clear effects but also that most of the Internet backbone infrastructure survived: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/archive/ripe-44/presentations/ripe44-tt-sql-slammer/
  • Improved Secure Communication System for RIPE NCC Members / Andrei Robachevsky (RIPE NCC)
    An initial proposal was presented on how to improve the current system by using a X.509-based PKI model.
  • The RIPE NCC LIR Portal v.1 / Leo Vegoda and Manuel Valente (RIPE NCC)
    The new portal service's features were explained in a live demonstration.

TUTORIALS

  • The RIPE NCC IP Request Tutorial, given by the RIPE NCC staff, was presented. It explained address space assignment and allocation procedures in the RIPE NCC region.
  • The NetFlow Services tutorial, given by Benoit Claise (Cisco Systems), on reviewing the design, configuration, tuning and troubleshooting of NetFlow versions was presented during the EOF.
  • The BGP Troubleshooting tutorial, given by Philip Smith (Cisco Systems), covering common problems ISPs face when deploying BGP within their networks was also presented during the EOF.

FIRST RIPE MEETING WEBCASTING

The first RIPE Meeting webcast was held at RIPE 44. Recordings of sessions held in the Grand Ballroom have been archived.

HOSTMASTER CENTRE

The RIPE NCC Hostmaster Centre was open during RIPE 44. The centre continues to be a useful facility for the meeting attendees and will be provided at RIPE 45.

RIPE 45

RIPE 45 will be held in Barcelona, Spain from 12 to 16 May 2003.