Daily Meeting Report

Monday, 15 October

Welcome to Amsterdam – home to canals, cheese, cyclists, “coffee”, and everyone’s favourite Network Coordination Centre. With some unseasonably warm October weather, the first day of RIPE 77 ended with 815 attendees registered and 660 checked-in. Some impressive numbers so far, but will it be enough make this the biggest RIPE Meeting yet? Follow this these daily meeting reports to find out!

Highlights from Monday’s programme:

Our favourite tweets:

 

Tuesday, 16 October

Day 2 of RIPE 77 is done and dusted. It was another beautiful, warm sunny day in Amsterdam (not that many of us saw much of it!) and by the end of the day, we welcomed 714 attendees (including 203 newcomers). The meeting programme featured a full-day of plenary presentations.

Highlights from Tuesday’s programme:

The day concluded with an interesting BoF discussion on how the RIPE Meetings are evolving and what future RIPE Meetings should look like, the Newcomers’ Reception and the first off-site social at ESCAPE.

Our favourite tweets:

 

Wednesday, 17 October

Wednesdays are when RIPE Meetings shift gear and the working groups kick into action. Those of us who went overboard at last night’s social at Escape were probably not enjoying the 9 am start but no matter – the show must go on! It was a packed day both in terms of the agenda and attendees – with 760 people checked-in and 828 registered by day’s end – making this the biggest RIPE Meeting so-far.

Here are some highlights from today:

DNS WG

  • DNS OARC Update from Kieth Mitchell.
  • The Internet didn’t break with the KSK rollover – Edward Lewis gave a behind-the-scenes recap from ICANN’s perspective, while Petr Špaček highlighted a tool to test whether your website’s DNS might break instead in 2019 due to non-compliant DNS standards.

Address Policy I

  • As the RIPE NCC approaches full IPv4 exhaustion, Andrea Cima presented some thoughts and ideas to the working group. Should we add more address space to the pool reserved for IXPs? What about the tiny pieces of returned IPv4 address space – ranging from /25 to /29? And what to do with address space that is returned to the RIPE NCC after runout?

Connect WG

  • There was a presentation on discovering remote peers at IXPs: remote peering is a significantly common practice in all the IXPs studied and for the largest IXPs, remote peers account for 40% of their member base. Research also shows that today IXP growth is mainly driven by remote peering, which contributes two times more than local peering.
  • DE-CIX announced that in January 2019 they will be blocking their old IPv4 space.
  • There was a discussion about how the WG could improve, perhaps by making anonymous contributions possible or finding presenters from different regions.

Address Policy II

Routing I

  • A proposal from Job Snijders, Martin Levy and Erik Bais on how to clean up RIPE-NONAUTH data using RPKI was hotly debated and will spill into the WG’s second session on Thursday. Marco Schmidt, RIPE NCC, reminded everyone to state their opinions on the Routing WG Mailing List so they can be officially considered in the PDP.

MAT

RIPE NCC Services WG

As is the custom on Wednesdays, the day ended with everyone unceremoniously ejected from the main room shortly after the close of the RIPE NCC Services Working Group – so that members could be allowed back in ceremoniously for the RIPE NCC General Meeting.

Our Favourite Tweets:

 

And here’s a song that’s waiting to be composed….

 

Thursday, 18 October

Thursday at RIPE 77 kicked off bright and early with eight Working Group sessions lined up on the agenda, some raring to get started, others due to pick up where they had left off earlier in the week. Once again, the number of attendees exceeded anything we’ve seen at previous RIPE Meetings with 790 checked in altogether (225 newcomers).

Here are some highlights from today:

Routing II

  • In the first of two talks scheduled for the sessions, Alexander Azimov told us all about ASPA, a simple, scalable method for improving routing security 
  • We also heard from Florian Hibler who took to the podium to make a case for segment routing 
  • The session ended with a return to the matter of NON-AUTH objects that dominated a somewhat heated round of questions in the first Routing WG session the day before. Alexander Azimov presented some useful data points he’d gathered on the issue since then, much to the appreciation of the room.

Cooperation

  • Chris Buckridge of the RIPE NCC presented on the ITU Plenipotentiary – and received a general sigh of relief from the room that RIPE NCC will be present to provide technical advice.
  • Julf Helsingius gets two prizes – first for the most acronyms in a presentation title for giving a talk titled ‘Update on the ICANN EPDP on WHOIS/GDPR’ and the second for sharing a fantastic quote summarising the entire process he spoke about: “We went all the way down the deep, dark rabbit hole, and what we found was not cute fluffy bunnies, but rabbit shit!” ~ Beth Bacon. The only thing we know, he declared, is that the end result will be GDPR compliant.
  • Arnold van Rhijn, from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, Netherlands, gave a presentation based on precisely one slide. EuroDIG will be in the Hague in May 2019.
  • Other presentations in this session included cooperation between ETNO and RIPE, talk to Hervé Clement for more details, and Suzanne Taylor from the RIPE NCC shared how EU regulation affects the RIPE community.

IPv6

Anti-Abuse

  • The start of the session saw consensus in practice with the re-election of WG chair Tobias Knecht and the election of a new third co-chair Alireza Vaziri.
  • Angela Dall’Ara gave an update on the abuse-c implementation of the policy proposal and by and large people are curious to see how it’s all going to work in the coming months.
  • To police or not to police – and that’s not talking about a playlist for a road trip. That was the key question with regard to out of region LIRs and offshore companies with unclear documentation. Carlo Friacas and Dhia Mahjoub both shared very interesting details in their presentations, ‘LIRs from Outside the RIPE NCC Service Region’ and ‘Criminal Abuse in RIPE IP Space’ respectively.

Database

DNS II

Open Source

  • A new, upcoming version of the IRRd software was presented, version 4. It is a complete rewrite of IRRd and includes a lot of features that make it very interesting for all network operators.
  • It has been an exciting three years for CloudFlare and their network automation using Salt. Many features have been integrated using open source software and there are many more features in the pipeline.
  • The Snabb open-source toolkit was presented. It offers network engineers tools for building fast, flexible network functions. Applications range from simple one-off diagnostics to border routers processing traffic for large networks.
  • There were two lightning talks: the first about the latest OpenBSD release, which is now at 6.4. The second was the presentation of Routinator 3000, an RPKI Relying party software written in Rust.

IoT

  • Security is still the biggest issue when talking about IoT devices. There was a great range of presentations, mostly related to consumer products and their security risks, from security experts from various areas: someone from the IETF homenet WG, two security people from the Dutch police, a security tester/hacker and a researcher. There was a good deal of active participation from the audience and a lot of potential for further collaboration.
  • Consensus on the IoT WG chair selection process was sought after an active discussion on the mailing list.

The day ended with a BoF aimed at discussing whether the time has come for a separate working group to deal with issues in data centre management. Then, last but not least, those who had been able to secure a ticket in time climbed aboard for a brief canal cruise over to Amsterdam’s Westerkerk for an evening of organ music at the RIPE Meeting Dinner.

Our Favourite Tweets:

 

 

Friday, 18 October

The last day of the RIPE Meeting ended with 801 attendees checked in – and what a week it was! Some highlights from the day:

NRO/RIR Updates

  • A panel of much-truncated updates from our colleagues at the other RIRs – this time we just got the highlights.
  • An update from the NRO EC, which is not to be confused with the ASO AC… or the NRO NC for that matter – although these are basically the same thing – though the NRO NC is the group of people chosen from the five RIR communities to perform the role of the ASO AC within the ICANN structure. Clear? Jim Reid helpfully offered an analogy – the NRO is like a plug that needs to fit into a certain type of socket (ASO) in order to hook into ICANN.
  • Some interesting stats on Internet number resource distribution in the five RIR service regions.
  • The first session ended with a discussion on the draft RIPE Chair Selection Procedure, that was recently circulated on the ripe-chair-discuss mailing list. A lot of the comments were about whether a Nominating Committee (NomCom) was the best way to select candidates, how the NomCom should be constituted, and what role (if any) WG Chairs should play in this process. Using the input from this session, (along with earlier mailing list comments), the proposal will be updated and shared again with the community The goal is now to reach consensus on a selection procedure at RIPE 78.

Closing Plenary

Closing Remarks from the RIPE Chair

  • Alireza Vaziri is the newest Anti-Abuse WG co-chair (bringing the total up to three)
  • Alireza Vaziri was also elected to join the RIPE Programme Committee (PC), while Maria Isabel Gandia was elected for another term.
  • Nurani Nimpuno was elected for a three year term on the NRO Number Council (NRO NC), starting on 1 January 2019.

Our Favourite Tweets

 

And the stenographers deserve a very special shout-out!

 

#tweetception #ThisMustEnd #SoLongAndThanksForAllDeNatas