Daily Meeting Report

Monday, 14 October

RIPE 79 is underway here among the towering toren of Rotterdam. It’s been a busy first day with 563 attendees checking in so far from 62 countries, of whom 149 are attending their first RIPE Meeting.

Here’s your highlights for the opening day.

Highlights from Day 1

  • We got started with two very interesting tutorials
  • Newcomers to RIPE Meetings were welcomed by Hans Petter Holen and Axel Pawlik before heading upstairs to attend the new Newcomers’ Lunch event.
  • Franziska Lichtblau introduced herself as the new RIPE Programme Committee Chair and wanted to make sure attendees send their feedback regarding the presentations and the programme.
  • Gerben Klein Baltin and Herman Timmermans showed how they make sure everyone will make the move to IPv6 with just one video (in Dutch!).
  • Nico Schottelius talked about that building a data center on IPv4 is like building a diesel car: it works, it sells, but it isn’t really sexy. IPv6 is not just for marketing, but also for sustainability!
  • A talk on Russia’s ongoing efforts to gain control of Internet resources along national lines from Ilona Stadnik of the Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia
  • A look into nine reasons why network engineers could stand to brush up on their software engineering skills
  • The day ended with a NOG BoF where NOG organisers and NOG attendees met to discuss whether NOGs should be a regular discussion item at RIPE Meetings. Representatives from DENOG, UKNOF, NLNOG and PTNOG exchanged ideas on how best to coordinate their efforts on this front. The next step is to raise the question of how NOGs fit into RIPE
    Meetings on the RIPE List.

Our favourite tweets from Day 1

Tuesday, 15 October

Second day of RIPE 79 was up and running with a full day of plenary presentations. We welcomed 662 attendees by the end of the day, including 169 newcomers.
Here’s an overview of the day.

Highlights from Day 2

    • The day started with a big focus on Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). Eugene Bogomazov talked about the importance of Route Origin Validation (ROAs) while Martin Levy gave an overview of the different RPKI Validators available.
    • A talk from Andrew McConachie, who reported on his experiment to perform HTTPS DANE Validation on Linux. Soon after, Moritz Müller gave a comprehensive analysis of the first ever DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover, which deemed to be a success!
    • A digital graffiti wall to celebrate 10 years of RIPE Labs.
    • A very interesting Women in Tech expert panel that shared their learning experiences and advice on how you can attract, hire and keep women in tech roles. They spoke about inclusion, how important onboarding is, and asked attendees to rethink the career pages of their companies.
    • In the afternoon, Sofía Silva Berenguer, presented a number of useful community tools the APNIC is providing to researchers and operators – some in collaboration with the RIPE NCC. Lay Yi Ohlsen from MLab showed some interesting measurements and visualisations based on various data sets – they are also very interested in collaborating with the RIPE NCC again.
    • Geoff Huston triggered some discussion with his presentation about the design of the BGP Protocol, why it has survived for 30 years, and why it is not likely to radically change anytime soon.
  • The day ended with:
    • A BoF on diversity – organisers and attendees shared their own experiences on how to build a more inclusive workforce.
    • A RACI session – in which academics, NRENs and others presented their work on a variety of topics including monitoring IoT devices, Internet clouds, RIPE IPmap and more.

And then, of course, the social: a networking event on a boat where attendees will get to admire the striking Rotterdam skyline from the water! We’re off to get ready for the cruise – and we’ll see you back tomorrow for the first day of RIPE Working Group sessions.

Our favourite tweets from Day 2

Wednesday, 16 October

Day three of RIPE 79 was Working Group Day. 600 attendees checked in including 180 newcomers. Here are some of the highlights:

Address Policy I

Address Policy II

  • After the break, Marco Schmidt ended his regular policy update by surprising the community with a new policy proposal that had been developed in a smokey back room within the RIPE NCC. The policy proposal, 2019-NCC, “Policy Development Office Changes”, suggests that Marco should pass the mantle of Policy Officer to Petrit Hasani.

Cooperation

Connect

DNS

Open Source

RIPE NCC Services

  • Felipe Victolla took the audience for a trip back in time in his DeLorean to explain the upcoming IPv4 run-out and how the RIPE NCC prepared for it.
  • Brenda Mainland and Fergal Cunningham presented findings from the RIPE NCC 2019 survey. The survey registered record participation and showed a really high member satisfaction rate.
  • Sandra Bras took the stage to present the brand new RIPE NCC’s Certified Professional program.
  • In one of the most emotional RIPE NCC services Working Groups, Axel Pawlik celebrated his 20th anniversary as Managing Director and announced that he will step down from his leadership role. He received a standing ovation from the audience and was warmly thanked by the community for his two decades of hard work and commitment managing the RIPE NCC.

The Incredible ROAs party

  • Last but not least, Adonis Stergiopoulos and Nathalie Trenaman celebrated networks that have signed their Route Origin Authorisations (ROAs) and are dropping invalids – as part of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). More than 50 attendees proved they have done so and claimed their prizes!

Thursday, 17 October

Thursday’s are always busy at RIPE Meetings – and this one was no different. Working groups kicked off bright and early from 9 am. 744 attendees checked in, 188 of whom proudly wear the ‘My First RIPE Meeting’ sticker. Like all other mornings, after the ritual queueing-up, meeting, and greeting at the barista station (that fuel that powers a RIPE Meeting), the crowd flowed into the two opening sessions of the day – Anti-Abuse and IPv6.

Anti-Abuse

  • Abuse-c validation kicked off this session with Marco Schmidt, first sharing updates from the RIPE NCC and Jordi Palet presenting his policy proposal. There was an acknowledgement of the role Marco has played as RIPE NCC policy officer as he recently handed this role over to Petrit Hasani.
  • Guillermo Cicileo’s talk on LACNIC’s WARP centre raised an interesting discussion on whether and how far the role of CSIRTs is intertwined with registry functions and community needs.
  • As always, there were several opinions and you can view it all first-hand in the archives if you didn’t make it to the morning session.

IPv6

  • Veronika McKillop gave an excellent presentation about IPv6-only deployment at Microsoft. Her statement that enterprise networks can deploy IPv6-only networks (instead of dual-stack) if they overcome the application layer problems also won kudos on Twitter.
  • Enno Rey gave a solid overview of the different types of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, their differences and similarities.
  • The presentation from Jens Link shed light on the recent discussions on the mailing list and explained how IPv6 is perceived amongst newcomers.
  • And finally, Jen Linkova called for ideas and actions for the IPv6 working group.

Routing

Procedures like WG Chair selection rarely makes it onto the Daily Meeting Report but Rob Evans did make an interesting suggestion in the Routing WG. He suggested that newcomers might find it less intimidating to announce their candidature to the existing Chairs and then the Chairs can announce all candidates together on the list. Benno Overeinder also suggested having a trainee WG intern, so that younger community members take up the mantle.

  • From the RIPE NCC, Florian Obser and Emile Aben, talked about the RIS BGP Route Collection and shared some thoughts about how to further develop RIS.
  • Nathalie Trenaman laid out plans for RPKI core infrastructure, including a full risk and security assessment from a third-party to identify weak points and areas of improvement.
  • Massimo Candela, NTT, presented BGP Alerter – an Open Source tool that provides real BGP hijack alerts and has asked for feedback.

IoT

MAT

Big data, millions of measurements and the latest tools to carry them out. If this tickles your fancy, make sure to watch the presentations from this sesssion.

Database

Ed Shryane’s presentation on Default maintainers was well-received, there were some comments about how resource-intensive it wil lend up being.
The big topic was the Database Task Force which also laid out the general structure of the taskforce.

The RIPE community plenary

Hans Peter Holen spoke about the final report from the Accountability Task Force.

Daniel Karrenberg presented about the RIPE Chair election process and called for volunteers for the Nomination Committee (NOMCOM). There are 17 volunteers so far, and we are aiming for 100. So, if you have attended the last three RIPE meetings, please apply!

Shane Kerr introduced the RIPE Database Task Force to the community, talked about its purpose and the timeline for the final document. The first draft should be published two months before RIPE 80 and the final version by RIPE 81.

The update on the Code of Conduct (CoC) by Brian Nisbet and Sasha Romijn, on behalf of the Diversity Task Force provides some serious food for thought. The community has worked towards being more inclusive, but there’s still some way to go. This talk triggered strong emotions, revealed some uncomfortable truths and a took hard look at whether the existing CoC is fit for this purpose. Watch this talk here.

Petrit Hasani, RIPE NCC’s new PDO officer, presented on the effectiveness of the current PDO process by showing key figures from the Address Policy and Anti-Abuse WGs. This opened a debate on how to improve the current PDP to increase participation and diversity.

BoF

Hisham Ibrahim moderated a BoF on the Centralised Internet. He invited attendees to share their thoughts on what a Centralised Internet could look like and what would be the consequences for the RIPE community.

Our favourite tweets from Day 4

Friday, 18 October

The last day of the RIPE Meeting ended with 736 checked-in attendees, of which 187 were newcomers.

NRO/RIR Reports

  • One minute before the NRO/RIR reports started, venue staff notified the RIPE NCC that a fire alarm had been set off, but that an evacuation was not required. So while we’re grateful for the attempt, anonymous benefactor, next time you’ll need to do a little more!
  • The session contained the usual RIR reports, a report from the NRO Executive Council (EC), the NRO Number Council (NC), some NRO statistics, and a report from IANA/PTI.
  • During the session, it was noted that the NRO was yet to report back following concerns about the quality of its statistics that were raised at RIPE 78.

Closing Plenary

  • In his closing remarks as RIPE Chair, Hans Petter Holen thanked Axel Pawlik for his 20 years serving the community as Managing Director of the RIPE NCC.
  • Two new chairs of the Routing WG were welcomed – Job Snijders and Paul Hoogsteder.
  • Pavel Lunin and Dmitry Kohmanyuk were (re)elected to the RIPE Programme.
  • Filiz Yilmaz was re-elected for another term on the NRO NC.