Thursday-Amal-4PM

Thursday, 30 October 2008 16:00

Closing Plenary

The closing plenary commenced as�follows:

Rob: Good afternoon, everybody. I think it's 4�o'clock, at least on my watch. Let us start with the last session of this RIPE meeting. People in the back, please find a seat or continue your conversations outside. We have a couple of business items and then some closing issues. First as I announced already at the end of last session, I will ask somebody from the DNS Working Group to give a short presentation on how far we have or they are with their reply I see you walking in. � there is Jim, Jim come straight this way go up there. Draft text for a possible answer to the NTAA request for opinion.

SPEAKER: OK folks. Thanks very much. The Department of Commerce has got a branch called NTIA, the acronym escapes me but they are under consultation just now with a notice of inquiry for comments on several proposals for signing the route zone. Now, this is something that I think certainly the DNS Working Group needs to respond to and I would hope the right community in general would like to respond to. As Rob Blokzijl Rob was mentioning just before the break I think we have our hands in that this fairly deeply already because I think we helped set the ball rolling by sending the signed route declaration from /TAL /AEUPB couple of years ago and we followed that up at the DNS Working Group with a statement on behalf of DNS working about how trust anchor repository could be structured and what kind of attributes that could have and I think that has helped the INTO officials and other people working on this particular leap IANA to formulate a process and system. So that initial statement we had for signing the route came from the RIPE community, and I think we would like to try and achieve the same result this time around.

Now, we had a couple of bits of discussion about this on the mailing list and a fairly extensive discussion of DNS Working Group yesterday and it's proved a little bit hard tore reach consensus than we thought thought, not we have any major issues of debate here but just as a question of clarification and one or two uncertainties along the way about how things in the wording should be structured but it's taking a little bit longer than expected. In an ideal world I would like to be in a position to say this is a statement from the DNS Working Group that has been accepted as consensus and then hopefully we can then get consensus here from the RIPE community but we are not going to be able do thatted to.

So, what is the background here? Well, the NTIA notice of inquiry on signing the root requires responses to be in by November 24th. We have discuss this had a little bit the DNS Working Group and we are still thrashing out one or two bits of detail. We should respond, and still a definition of here what do we mean by we; that the RIPE community or is it the DNS Working Group? So if we can't get the DNS� RIPE community as a whole to do something I think there is a reasonable chance we should be able to get the DNS Working Group to reach consensus but hopefully reach consensus the RIPE community reach consensus about that too. The important point here is our response is going to be much more generic and high level about the key features and attributes we would like to see in any mechanism for signing the root and we are not going to respond in the exact format the NTIA has asked for. They have got 13 questions and a questionnaire they would like responses to. I would urge everybody here that has got any interest in this stuff to please go to the NTIA website, review the comment already been made and please respond. I think NTIA particularly would like to see responses from as many people as possible particularly those outside the United States. So, I would urge you all to please take the time to look at this document, study the various proposals and give measuredarguments about this and try to focus on the technical merits of the stuff and not get sucked into the geopolitical rathole and all these other things of things that people make in other quarters. So I urge all of this to support this. We need responses from you as well.

The little flame effect didn't work, too bad.

So, what we think we can achieve here is that we are going to try and set a deadline for the Working Group to reach consensus, and we think that is certainly feasible, should be feasible by November the 10th. If we can't reach that date, I suggest that at that point the Working Group drops the subject complete hely. Working Group can't reach consensus that is the end of the matter there, we should be able to reach consensus by that date, it's a piece of one or two piece of clarification need to be done or one or two iterations to get everybody on board with that so the intention would be assuming we reach consensus the day after probably November 11th we will circulate this to the RIPE mailing list and allow one week for people in the RIPE mailing /THRO*EUS comment. When I say that, yes I approve of this or no, I don't, we are not looking to go through another edit cycle or ask people to change the wording or add points. In you have any comments what the DNS working group is proposing the place is DNS working mailing list not RIPE general mailing list. And the intention will then be is that we will send a response to the NTIA around about November 20th two or three days ahead of the deadline self. Just to give a heads up, these are the fundamental bullet points that we have in a response so we start off with some fairly high level things and then get to things a bit more substantial and technical detail. I think the most important point we want to emphasise and that is why these are if you like in decreasing order of priority is the first thing is DNS Sec is be data authenticity and integrity not about control. We want to be able to guarantee the authenticity of the information in the DNS, we are not interested in arguments about control. And it's not about that, anyway.

We have to regular recognise the additional of DNS Sec to the root zone has to be seen as global initiative that involves everybody who /HOS got an interest securing DNS infrastructure, this isn't some US thing that is being led by ICANN and IANA with in conjunction with /TP*ED sign this, should involve all of us. Everybody uses the Internet, we all rely on the DNS, some of us run root servers, we all have a stake and make the effort to make sure that point is brought home especially others might be trying to make out some kind of US land grab attempt shouldn't be seen this wayality all. Adding stuff to the DNSSEC should be done in which is not going to put any of the counter plug of the DNS at any kind of risk.

And we want the DNS zone signed quickly but in a way which is rushed or haphazard or if I can use the expression half assed. Let's do it right (don't) and let's take a little bit of time and consideration to do it lets try and get it done as quickly as we can, not drag on and on and excessive degrees of consultation on it. We need to get progress on that and try to get progression fairly quickly.

We think it's also important that changes to the procedural aspects of the DNS Sec should be aligned with the way in which existing changes are coordinated for the root zone and that pretty much means someone talks to IANA says please change the delegation for this this top level domain, goes to the department of commerce who check it to make sure nothing stupid going on and instructions given to update and distribute it. So these particular roles maybe not necessary entities or things make change at some point in the future. Try to make the introduction of DNSSEC have the same look and feel as the way in which we do things to the root zone today. The policies and process for signing the root should be made as easy for other TLDs to participate and for TLDs that do choose to sign their zones the mechanisms that provided for them to present their keys or the DS records if they want to be more pedantic, the way they present key material to the root zone for inclusion in the signed root should be simple and straightforward and shouldn't be artificial barriers to make that difficult.

Point G: We don't see the need for another organisation to involve itself or oversee this process of signing the root. We don't need another layer of bureaucracy, thank you very much, there is no technical justification and hopefully that technical justification can also be argued for those who may argue on a political level about the need for such a thing. There is no technical reason for it so why do it? We want to make sure the data doesn't move between organisations or entities without appropriate authenticity, some kind of out of band secure mechanism with certificates or SSH, then going to be used to transfer key material between the parties involved in this and for the transmission of DS records and any other credentials that might be involved in this exercise.

This one is selfevident, the public part of the key signing key must be distributed as widely as possible, if we couldn't have the key signing key well distributed DNSSEC ain't going to fly. And know one is fairly selfevident the organisation that generates the root zone file has to hold the private parts of the zone signing key, that signs the resource records you need that in order to sign the zone and you can't generate the zone without having the private key.

One or two points under discussion here and this is where again, this is one of the areas where we still have a little bit of contention here is that changes to the entities and roles in the signing processes should not necessarily involve a change in keys, and this is something we are still trying to bottom out in clarification and it conflicts a little bit with one of the earlier points point D where we wanted to say that the mechanism for introduction of DNSSEC should be aligned with the current way in which the root zone is updated and managed and changes coordinated there. We are trying to refine this stuff, point D and K will be combined in some way, we also underpin here is that whatever entities and roles are going to be involved in this we shouldn't have a mechanism that is necessarily cast in stone, because it could well be this procedure and process may have to change over time because somebody comes up with a better mechanism for dealing with it or there is a need for some other entity involved. Say for example hypothetically, the Verisign is no longer involved in the generation of root zone file, doesn't have a role, and in fact one of the proposals that is actually put forward is that the root zone signing isn't done by Verisign but by another organisation. Or some of the proposals have that characteristic.

So after we sent out those initial bullet points, yesterday afternoon we got a little bit of traffic on the mailing list overnight and first thing this morning and another point was added here and this is to say here try to balance the various concerns but we will have to try and do this which maximally provides a secure solution and one which is going to give everybody the level of trust that we think we can get from DNSSEC so again it's a fairly generic motherhood and apple pie statement. So the intention is to we are going too far lot of discussion on the DNS Working Group list, if you are interested in this, please participate in the discussion, and then we will try to thrash out some kind of letter and then that would then be the basis of the thing that would go for consultation to the RIPE list and then ultimately hopefully on to NTIA. Now, again, my personal initial thoughts were we could have a simple one paragraph statement that we would fit on one slide address all of our concerns, clearly that is not going to be the case now. We will have a fairly detailed letter, you know, maybe a couple of pages of text but that is where I think we are going to be headed and that is just to give you a heads up as to where things are going. So as I say, if you are interested in this discussion, keep an eye on what is going on in the DNS Working Group mailing list, participate, we will try and reach consensus over the next week and ten days, and assuming we can, we will be coming back to the RIPE community for a statement on this with a view to putting it out towards NTIA. If the RIPE communities there are violent objections or we can't reach consensus we will probably send somebody from the DNS Working Group assuming reach consensus. In case anybody is concerned about the time scales and time lines for this we are doing here which is a general community statement, we are not making policy, so this does not have to follow the policy development process, this is not a policy thing. This is just a general statement. That, I think, I am done and I would like to ask for any questions.

CHAIR: Thank you, Jim, for your presentation and thank the DNS Working Group for putting some work in this. Are there any questions or comments? OK. I take this silence as overwhelming support for your proposed work schedule.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Next item is a very short one, it's just let's say information and a formal wrap up. A few meetings ago we installed a task force on what was then called enhanced cooperation. Those of you who were here earlier this week already heard the final report of that task force. In between the last RIPE meeting and this RIPE meeting, progress has been made in two fields: One, the task force has to deliver the final report, which was circulated a couple of months ago already, and which we have decided now is the final report. The second thing is that the task force had one strong recommendation that this activity should be turned in a RIPE Working Group. The Working Group has been formed and had its first meeting this morning and ran over time, which I think is a sign of success for a new Working Group, they had enough on the agenda to attract enough interest to go over into the coffee break.

So, the current status is as�follows: We have closed the task force and we have created a Working Group, and the Working Group has two chairs who both couldn't make it to this meeting but they have both been many times at previous meetings so that was just a coincidence. If you are interested, go to the RIPE website and subscribe yourself to the mailing list. That I think all interim chair, Patrik which we should report now. OK. Patrick has been chairing the meeting this morning.

Task forces, we have an ongoing data Protection Task Force to remind you what that is all about; we have the Whois service, our database and that database contains personal data and 15 years ago there were no problems there; A, it was a small group of people; and B we were not so concerned or the society was not so much concerned about protection of personal data. All that has changed, so a while ago, we thought we have to study the status of this data in our database and we created a task force, a data Protection Task Force and that task force met earlier this week and I think have a few minutes reporting to do and I have just volunteered Johan to do that.

SPEAKER: Thank you, Rob. Yes, we met in the beginning of the week, on Monday, I think we had a useful meeting. We gave a report this morning in the Database Working Group, if you couldn't make it this morning please have a look at the report. Also, we brought forward an advice towards the Working Group regarding mirroring, which led to quite some discussion and led to some more action points for the data Protection Task Force so we will take those action points on board, and we will continue our work. We do hope that to wrap things up quite shortly, maybe even in between these meetings, but that depends a a bit on the progress and whether we will be able to meet. So, I want to leave it at that. If there are any specific questions or concerns, I am happy to answer them. OK.

CHAIR: OK. Thank you.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Next, I have all my little agenda here, a more traditional item over the last session slot and it is a report on the network which we have been using this week and James Aldridge will enlighten us on what happened, what didn't happen. And why not.

James Aldridge: OK. This is a very short presentation, summarising what happened at this RIPE meeting from the technical side. Very short technical summary of what has happened this week. The basically covering introducing the meeting team, a little late, but they have been wandering around all week. Brief description of the network, the problems we encountered over the week a few statistics and then Eric from the technical team and the RIPE NCIS kept has introduced a night little an mated film of the wireless LAN activity over the week.

This is the meeting team. We had three new members join the meeting team from the RIPE NCC this time. Old timers are Brian, my manager, Eric, myself, razz van /PWAOUB en. We welcome Louis Menno and Tim to the meeting this time. This is the meeting network we built. It's a little bit simpler than the network we had in Berlin, because we ran slightly short on setup time. Which I will come to later. We basically� but we have got the typical RIPE meeting network, private network for the registration desk and so on, the services network for the� for ROSIE and the webcast machines, public network for the terminal room and the wireless LAN, there is a server on that network for, on each for general administrative housekeeping kind of roles. Connectivity, we have 100 megabit long to Etisalat, native IPv4 transit is through Etisalat, IPv6 we tunnel back to the RIPE NCC Amsterdam for this meeting, there is a GOE tunnel to the RIPE NCC router at Nicheve, from there IPv6 to the world. We continuing to use the, for this meeting, the /32 from� borrowed from Telecity Deutsche land, they very kindly let us use that� their block for this meeting as well as for RIPE 56, I would like to thank them very much for that. Hopefully by the next meeting we will have a policy in place we can have our own v6 block in some form. I refer you to the Address Policy Working Group earlier in the week for that. As far as problem encountered. When we came to set up we discovered the hotel's internal wiring wasn't quite as good a as we thought when he came on the scouting trip. We 100 kilometre of UTP cable around the meeting area to build this network. Used very little of the hotel's own structured cabling. Throughout the week we had a few problems, on Sunday morning before the meeting started we had some reachability issues with v4 which we always tend to get when we turn up the network in a new place, and there seemed to be configuration problem on the Etisalat proxies and we were getting TCP connection errors for every website we tried to visit. That was all fixed well before the meeting started at lunchtime on Sunday. The biggest problem we had this week was power outage on Wednesday morning which took out amongst� apart from the webcast desk here and it took out our main switch router transit link, you name it pretty much, servers. We got most stuff running again but it seems that when the link came back up again our IPv4 prefix wasn't being announced to the world. That was fixed by Etisalat eventually, I am not sure what caused that; it looks like some either very, very aggressive flap damping or something else. Few statistics about the network:

This is the total v4 and v6 traffic. We peaked at around 30 megabits on Wednesday, the times here are in UTC, so add four hours, I think, to get local time. That is very similar to most other RIPE meetings, I think. The wireless LAN, we had a peak of around 200 users on the network at the busiest times, may be slightly over. That slightly down on the Berlin meeting. That� I am not sure the reason. There are slightly fewer attendees at this meeting but I think not as many people brought laptops to the meeting area and the graph kind of looks like the Dubai skyline. Unintentionally. Any questions? I will just move on to the quick animated film show of the access points which I hope will just play. This is the size of the dots indicates the number of clients with each access points throughout the week. Overnight, the area is locked up, there are no users. What we found in this particular venue is the� these moveable partitions between the different parts of the ballroom are very good at shielding RF. The users on access points in each room tend to be local to that room. There is very little spill over, which makes the wireless network much easier to set up. And this will carry on for another minute or so F there are any questions, let me know. If not, I will let this run to the end.

CHAIR: Questions?

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Martin Leavy from Hurricane. Is this the highest latency or further away meeting for RIPE and does that remain to the bandwidth in any way?

SPEAKER: We don't seem� the round trip time from here to Amsterdam is around 140 milliseconds. I don't know how that is routed. It probably is the furthest away we have been from Amsterdam.

CHAIR: Geographically, yes.

SPEAKER: And probably network topologywise as well.

CHAIR: Randy.

Randy: I avoided the crowds occasionally by crawling into the Ops Room and have seen how well these folk did under nonoptimal circumstances and I think you deserve a large round of applause.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Thank you Randy for stealing my words.

SPEAKER: One other point: About the wireless LAN we will be turning off� we have to pack everything up overnight because the hotel want their rooms back in the morning, we will be turning off the wireless LAN probably about half an hour after the meeting finishes and we will be turning off the wireless LAN in this room first because a lot of cabling to put out, so probably about five or ten minutes after we will switch off the access points in this room.

CHAIR: Right. I think I did not forget any of the requests for short reports, which came over the week. There is a request for creating a new Working Group and I am looking at Remco and don't say oh, it's that man again. Because we all know that.

Remco:

CHAIR: For those of you who are new here, Remco has been entertaining us for the last two years with a simple policy proposal called transfer policy and he has learned lot from that and now he wants to have a different kind of activity.

Remco: Yes, some of you might have noticed that within RIPE we are trying to become more transparent, we have now got Cooperation Working Group and there is a few other things that we are trying to settle down and well get formalised.

There is, of course, one aspect of the RIPE meetings, one of the vital aspects that wasn't formalised until now, so I am proposing to do that today. And it's called The Non Working Group. This is a charter. If it looks like work or feels like work, then it probably doesn't belong here. This is the shortest charter that I could come up with which covers basically all aspects of The Non Working Group. We have also got a chair, it's� the history first. So there has been a bit of history preceding this Working Group. The swimming pool and sunbathing in Rhodes back in 2002 I think that was. We also have of course the going out late and get wasted Working Group in any Amsterdam meeting and the let's go shopping in Istanbul. It's all very nice but not very structured. So in addition we have got a chair. He is industry expert, years of experience in chairing it's a wellknown figure and he is quite neutral. He also fits very well with the wall paper. This is Mr.�RECliner. Who is going to be the chairer of these Working Group. You might have seen him in your hotel room or any other hotel room in the world. He is a quiet chair and we like him that way, we love him for that. We don't really need much from the NCC, we don't want an mailing list, we are going to waive all voting rights. We won't attend the working chair meetings. What we do need is some space in the meeting plan and sufficient facilities to do for whatever we are not doing. So this is our proposed meeting plan.

(Applause)

As you can all see, this is only a very minor change to the current meeting plan and this actually reflects more the reality than the current meeting plan does. So /SEU propose to form this Working Group as of now and I am not going to take any questions unless you have got a really good one.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Olaf, only not questions.

AUDIENCE: I have a slight problem with the chair. I think he is too stuffed, too much stuff is in its brain and I would suggest a smaller stuffed thing.

(Applause)

SPEAKER: If the room agrees, I propose to follow this proposal.

CHAIR: Thank you, Remco. I have lots of questions but the slide says it all. Which I think brings us sort of seamlessly into next item on the agenda, the report from yet another not advertised Working Group. For those of you who are for the first time at a RIPE meeting this is colloquially known as the Secret Working Group.

SPEAKER: Ed to we are running an experiment, going to run this presentation from the web. Let's see if that works. It should work. Let's go. Backup plan. Can somebody modify it, set up a CPN for me.

AUDIENCE: If this is secret how do the UAE know about it so they can put it into the proxy.

SPEAKER: Don't ask me, don't ask questions you don't want answers to. So here we are. The report from the Secret Working Group, as you know this happens almost every RIPE meeting. One of the things that I think the RIPE� Secret Working Group tries to do is come up with a common theme. I have been exposed to some of the workings of the Working Group, and in order to find a theme some of the members of the Working Group usually go out, buy a stack of post cards and then come up with a theme from the touristy things or something. Well, that was done, post card was looked for and I think that there is...

(Applause)

I think that the suggestion was clear but, in fact, the powers that be have overruled that and the magic word for tonight is sand. Oh, yes, I need to introduce this because what happened here is that apparently during the presentation of one� I think this was M6, it was mentioned that if anybody wants to be a member, they should raise their hand and a date could be arranged, so

Nigel: AMSIX has a new cunning plan to acquire more traffic you can. Have a nice date with Kim. Turn the lights down to dim. Sign up and connect to the LAN.

SPEAKER: But of course you have room to invest this week and you know all know this is a market so things can go� can get worse. This is NetNod, who have Nurani at their disposal for making offers and bringing new members� bringing new members into the cave.

AUDIENCE: Not to be out done Nurani said you could grab her and� NetNod gave us more of the same. Now Nurani is playing the game. You have got nothing to lose, there is a cave we can use and no one will say you're to blame.

(Applause)

SPEAKER: One of the questions I have for you, who looked at CNN most recently? There is really late breaking news, I hope you can read this for the people.

Nigel: This is a marketing announcement on behalf of DECIX. Dubai UAE AF P /routers, the best internet exchange ever announced that it has secured the lease on the top floor of the new building. Said Mr.  spokes span "with this new step DECIX will also be the highest internet exchange in the world. This is an exciting step for us and our customers and we look forward to expanding our already enormous visibility."

When confronted with the news a spokesman for the Nepal internet exchange peedly contested the claim for the highest internet exchange. "Surely or Yack powered coaxe segment is highertoday's announcement follows the rapid success other significant claims best internet exchange ever. Film at eleven."

(Applause)

SPEAKER: We have actually, we have actually found the new designs, modifying the tower to introduce a new structure on top of it. No questions. And enough about M6s and other network exchanges, this is where we draw a line in the sand. Mike: I am retiring didn't you mow? Dubai is is a city we are told. That is built on a pool of black gold. But to be diplomatic, the power was erratic, a brown out, a black out, out cold.

(Applause)

SPEAKER: Interesting times, interesting times. Interesting times. While in the rest of the world all the curves are declining, basically if you look at your newspaper on each side there is a declining curve, has to do with the economy of something. What we saw this week were curves that all rising and this inspired the Secret Working Group to do the following:

Nigel: All the charts seemed to be on the rise. Bandwidth, version 6, no surprise. But the fattest of all, not a hint of a fall, was the Randy count taking first prize. (Fastest)

SPEAKER: And of course, if you measure things you get into statistics, and it seems that in this world, especially in this place, Murphy seems to beat the statistics, the normal fate of chance, so to speak. Let's first do the observation or let's first put the hypothesis forward and later we are going to do a small little experiment to see if this is true.

Mike: The badges have been kind of fun, they are two sided not only just one. With your name on the back, on the other a map, if you're lost just look down at your tum.

SPEAKER: So here fellows the experiment; I would like to you look at your badge, not touch it, and see if the name is in front F the name is in front, raise your hands, I bet this is less than half� oh... that is very unfortunate. Statistics prove� the next time the Secret Working Group will make some arrangements and we will repeat this experiment.

Nigel: Dubai the jewel of the Middle East, was host to RIPE who thronged its ancient ways, from twilight cruise to evening desert feast, we drifted in a pleasant, sleepy haze. Displaying languid interest in the slides that flashed upon the screen before our eyes, while Randy Bush as regular as tides, bobbed up and down to sharply analyse. While those less diligent than even us slipped out to shopping mall for knock off cheap, arriving just in time to catch the bus and evening's entertainment meeting seek, where belly dancing girls woke us at last and any lingering thought of work soon passed.

(Applause)

SPEAKER: For the less literally inclined we return to our regular sonnet again. Dry sand.

Daniel: Two fellows went out of the door, in the desert one could hear one roar. An oasis I see, full with numbers IP, but there was of the final v4. (There was none) mike: We are used to do it in the morning on a Friday and not Thursday afternoon and hangover� you need to press go.

SPEAKER: That is what you are waiting for.

Mike: If your v4 addressing is is a mess, feel exhaustion is causing you stress, when the weather gets warm, and the sand's in a storm, every grain gets a v6 address.

(Applause)

Daniel: Lorenza, he does his v6 bit. About methods he feared he would be hit. But to his great surprise, we did all realise, nothing good happens unless one does it.

(Applause)

SPEAKER: And talking about Google here a little bit of Google earth.

Nigel: Zooming in with the mouse in your hand, slowly moving away from the sand, with Google earth you will see a new aisle in the sea and it shows our most favourite brand

SPEAKER: You might think, let's have a look at Google maps.

(Applause)

SPEAKER: Well, this might be your favourite brand but there are other as /PWROE built as well. It's nothing to do with us. Very secret stuff going on there. The future of sand; well, we are trying to do some pattern analysis on past, present and future, and we think we have found a trend, looking at Berlin, this is what we saw; in Dubai, this is what we saw; and now the question is what will we see in Amsterdam?

Nigel: In Berlin the girls only wear one, in Dubai two is certain to stun, but in Amsterdam town, though it causes a frown, three or more is considered as fun.

SPEAKER: Thank you.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Nigel, don't walk away please because I made a terrible error, I had my notes on two pieces of paper and one serious announcement slipped through. Nigel, in his role as chairman of the RIPE NCC executive board.

Nigel Titley: As you probably all know, the RIPE region sends three people to the numbers council and two are voted in by your good selves and one is appointed by the NCC board from a list of nominations that you are kind enough to send in to us. In previous years we have only ever had one nomination which makes things very easy for us, this year we have three, which means we actually had to do a bit of work but, never mind. It was quite difficult, as we actually had three good candidates, and so we actually spent sometime on this. We have given consideration and bearing in mind that stability in the current climate is probably a good thing, we have chosen to reappoint Wilfried Woeber to the numbers council.

(Applause)

CHAIR: Thank you. And now we are getting very close to the end and as usual we have to thank many people and we have to hand out some prizes. It's all far too much to be handled by one person and so we make this into a team effort. Your stuff is here. In the first place, it's I think I speak on behalf of all of you when we thank our host, Etisalat very, very very much. You may not have noticed it but we from the more organisational side, we do know that they have done a tremendous job behind the screens to make this meeting as successful as it is. So I would like specifically to thank our good old friends, Sultan Al Shamshi and Abdullah Hashem. (Applause).

And there is a little token of our thank you, thank you thank you, we brought some little gifts, if you could be so kind as to pass one on to Abdullah. Thank you, again. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

We had a couple of sponsors this time for which we are also very, very grateful, without sponsors we can't have such pleasant evenings in general, also the terminal room this time was sponsored by MENOG, so MENOG, DU, Google and Linx, thank you very much (Linx). For your contribution to this very successful meeting.

And you heard from James, the RIPE NCC network team already that when they started setting up the network here, there were some surprises and things like cabling (in), they had to pull a kilometre of cables and to do a lot of other stuff. There are always people who are coming well in time for RIPE meeting and some of their rolled up their sleeves and did a great job during the setup and specifically we would like to thank Sander Steffann and Randy Bush. Are you here? Randy? Could you please come here and accept a little token of appreciation. (Applause)

AUDIENCE: A question, a question: .

CHAIR: We would like to extend our thanks to Phillip Smith who did a great job in helping MENOG to get their programme together. On the first morning there were tutorials for the MENOG people and you may have noticed there were various presentations earlier in the week from people from the region here and so Philip, thank you. (Applause) and Philip, are you still in the room? Thank you, Philip.

Talking about the plenary programme, as usual Joao come as and the RIPE Working Group chairs have been very active in putting the plenary together. It is not an easy job, a lot goes on before you come here, sit down and be entertained. So Joao and all the other Working Group chairs, thank you very much. (Applause)

Remco, could you come up, please. It's that man again. Those of you who have been following the last couple of years, the Address Policy Working Group, you may have noticed that I think Remco broke all records by keeping a proposed policy alive through many, many cycles of discussion, and so we thought this time we give him a little prize for the most persistent proposer of a policy. Thank you. (Applause)

The RIPE NCC has been running a services centre next door and handed out lottery tickets to all these people who came there with their problems and now is the draw for� and the winner this time is number 211. 211. (Applause)

One of your problems is solved now. Then, since a couple of years we have this competition among the people who register, well you have all registered; the RIPE NCC likes people to register early, that helps in the planning. And I, as the chairman, like people to stay till the very last session because otherwise all the planning is is a little bit in vain so we combined these two requirements into the� the first three people who registered and are still present near the end of the meeting, they get a little award. And it works very simple, I have a look at the barges the right side of the barges the one with your name. In the upper righthand corner there is a number and the first� the lowest three present win. I have number 1, but that is built in so that doesn't count. It's just to test the registration software, I think. And number 2 has abstained. Number 2 is Peter could have and I have a mark here you abstained. It's number 3 from the AMSIX. (Applause) (K OC H)

Number 4, Remco. (Applause) needs no further introduction by now.

And the third prize winner carries number five, Christian /HAR /SKWRA*. No. The rules are very simple, if you are not here, you don't count. So we go over to number 6, Patrik.

Well, I think the slide says it all. This year we want to thank the people who for ten years or more already have been working at the RIPE NCC. You see the names there. I think Daniel Karrenberg is the one who has been working for the RIPE NCC longest because he started it, and so I think he has been responsible for hiring the rest of the list.

So, this is just to say our thank you to the RIPE NCC staff for people who come and stay so long, which I think is a good sign for any organisation, and I want to extend this thanking to all the RIPE NCC staff that has been around this week and some of them who have not been here but have been working in Amsterdam in a preparation for this meeting. So, a big round of applause for the good people of the RIPE NCC in organising this meeting. Thank you. (Applause) we have almost done. There were 55 people who attended RIPE meeting for the first time at this meeting and the majority of them were not, surprisingly, from the region, from the Middle East. We thank you for attending your first RIPE meeting, but of course, we hope to see you again at the next RIPE meeting and I do know from some of you have told me personally already that they have found this an excellent experience and they are committed to come to the next RIPE meeting.

So, the next RIPE meeting is in Amsterdam, 4th to 8th of May next year and I think we have done all our regular and irregular business. I would like once more to thank you all for coming, I hope you enjoyed it, I enjoyed Dubai a lot. Thanks Sultan and hope to see you all in Amsterdam. Have a nice trip home.

This meeting is closed.

(Applause)