Candidate Biographies

The candidates for the RIPE PC election at RIPE 79 will each be giving a brief comment in support of their candidacy in the Main Room at 15:55. Do come along if you’d like to find out more.

 

Dmitry Kohmanyuk

Statement of Interest

After many years of participating in RIPE Meetings, I would be very glad to be part of the RIPE Meeting programme committee. My goal is to keep the programme diverse and interesting for RIPE Meeting attendees and to find a balance of various topics that reflect modern trends.

Biography:

Dmitry Kohmanyuk graduated in 1992 from the Cybernetics Department of Kiev Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev (then Soviet Union, presently Ukraine), receiving a Masters Degree with honors.

He now resides in Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine and works as Chief of Strategy of Hostmaster Ltd, the registry for the .UA domain. He actively participates in the Internet community, attending local, regional and international forums, including RIPE, CENTR, ICANN, IGF and other meetings.

Dmitry speaks Ukrainian, Russian, and English (with a small set of Dutch words if needed.)

Dmitry has direct operational experience with networked Unix systems and router equipment, co-founding and running one of first Ukrainian ISPs back in 1991 (Communication Systems). His work included several technology start-up companies in the United States in the role of systems administrator, developer support and operations. He can write code and shell scripts, was a co-author of RFC 2319 and participated in the Ukrainian Unix Users Group.

He has been directly involved with Ukrainian ccTLD registration and operation since 1996, in both non-commerical and commerical forms, and continuously represented ccTLD with IANA. He sits on the board of Hostmaster. In the last two years, the local policy development process has restarted, community service has improved, IDNs have launched and operational migration to IPv6 was completed, as well as DNSSEC launch in March 2012.

Non-profit work includes IPv6 as well as DNSSEC promotion in the region, participating in UA-IX as a member of the technical committee and speaking with press to communicate about Internet technology, security and privacy issues. Two IGF-UA forums in Ukraine in 2010 and 2011 were organised with support from Dmitry and Hostmaster.

 

Ehsan Ghazizadeh

Biography

I started my career 11 years ago as a network engineer in the ministry of petroleum. After two years I joined an ISP as CTO and continued my career till now, working with different governmental organisations and also consulting with different ISPs regarding IPv6 deployments, routing design, DNSSEC/BGPSEC and also RPKI and routing security.

Due to the huge amount of DNS spoofing and prefix hijacking happening in today’s Internet, I truly believe in implementing DNS and BGP security protocols like DNSSEC, DOH, BGPSEC and especially RPKI route validation. I’ve done a lot of teaching regarding IPv6 deployments in various middle east countries as co-trainer for RIPE-NCC and also free IPv6 and RPKI training courses for local LIRs.

I’ve been a presenter at IRNOG and participated in numerous events related to the Internet community including RIPE Meetings, MENOG and IRNOG. I also really like participating in working groups to help solve issues and enhance the performance of anything related to the Internet community, especially service provider/security topics and IPv6, RPKI and DNS services. I’m eager to discuss topics in technology with different engineers around the region and to brainstorm to find the best strategy or roadmap to achieve goals efficiently.

 

Farhad Farjadmanesh

Statement of Interest

I would like to candidate for the PC election. I’ve been in the networking industry for almost 20 years and I started to work as network administrator in a small ISP (1998). I’ve became LIR in 2006 and became more active in the community by participating to RIPE 57 in Dubai (2008). After attending a few RIPE meetings, I realized that I was interested to become more than a regular attendee. I’ve been looking forward to getting a role for a while. I think and I hope by acting as a PC member that I can be more efficient and useful for our community.

 

Fernando Garcia

Statement of interest

I would like to be in the PC to help defining the programme so we can select content useful for all the community with a vision on the future of the network.

Biography

Fernando Garcia is a profesional with more than 40 years of experience in Computing and Communications, first as a programmer. In fact his first steps in communications were using the UUCP communications program with a 1200 bauds modem.

He founded one of the first ISPs in Spain and later, when the business for small ISPs disappeared under pressure from the local incumbent telco, he joined a VAR where he founded the Internet Development Team, dedicated to help larges companies (Banks, Utilities) to do their Internet presence implementation.

Later he joined BICS (Belgacom International) doing some innovative projects and now he’s part of Telefonica Digital de España, a subsidiary of the Telefonica global operator dedicated to the implementation of solutions for the mobile operators.

As a member of the community he’s an old RIPE member, his first meeting was RIPE 30, and he has always try to be an active member. During some years he and his colleague Juan Pedro Cerezo made measurements on the deployment of IPv6 and presented them in the RIPE meetings (i.e. RIPE 56).

He’s passionate about technology and specifically in the future of the Internet itself as a free, decentralised network.

 

Pavel Lunin

Statement of Interest

My goal in applying to be part of the RIPE Programme Committee is to keep the agenda at a very high level so as to attract experts from all over the world to RIPE Meetings. I also want to make the meetings a bit more technical in focus, and to see more discussion of state-of-the-art problems in computer networking and the Internet.

Biography:

Pavel is Network Product Manager at Scaleway, based in Paris. He has been engineering networks since 2003 and leading teams and projects since 2009. Before moving to France in 2015, he was CTO and co-founder at Senetsy, based in Moscow, Russia.

Pavel’s professional interest is everything around SP and DC networking, mainly focused on routing, BGP, MPLS, the SDN and automation buzz, as well as the management aspects of computer networking business.

He is also a member of the ENOG Programme Committee and serves as its representative on the RIPE PC.

 

Saif AL Ghafri

Statement of Interest

I’m interested in supporting the greater community and gaining the experience of community building, working towards bringing our regional knowledge up to the level of the rest of global internet community.

Biography

I started working in the areas of DNS and IPv6 in 2011 as a system admin, and I’m now working for the TRA in Oman. I’m also currently a member of the National IPv6 Committee in Oman.