BRIAN NISBET: I am now. Thank you very much, Mirjam.
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So, yes, we have come to the last Plenary session of RIPE 81 with a few things to go through just ‑‑ we're still, this morning, in the relevant virtual time zone. It's one of those things about virtual RIPE meetings, should we set them all to UTC, like we would if we were running a global network? But that can be a conversation for a mailing list somewhere.
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So, we have ‑‑ the first thing we would like ‑‑ I would like to address this morning is the PC elections. So, thank you to everyone who volunteered for the PC elections. The two successful candidates were, or are, Mohammad Boromand and Fernando Garcia, so congratulations to both of them, and thank you again very much to the other two people, to Stefan ‑‑ sorry, lost this email, apologies, I had it all very nicely ‑‑ to Stefan and Melchior also for volunteering.
I'd like to thank the outgoing members, Maria Isobel Gandia and Alireza Vaziri for their work on the PC. I'd like to remind everyone that there is a chance at every RIPE meeting to join the Programme Committee. We are in an ever‑changing world and new perspective and ideas are vital, so if you have any questions about the workload, the work, all of these things, please contact the PC either here at a meeting through one of the various platforms or via pc [at] ripe [dot] net, we're very happy to talk about it, and to explain things. I think it's a little easier to do at physical meetings but I think there are ways of doing it both between meetings and at these virtual meetings.
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So, please do talk to us if you have any questions.
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So, the main ‑‑ we don't have any, I suppose, external talks, I would almost say, but what we do have is the absolutely vital, especially in these virtual meetings, RIPE 81 technical report. So I'm hoping Oliver has been ‑‑ does Oliver have the appropriate speaking rights?
OLIVER PAYNE: Thanks, Brian.
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Hi, everyone. My name is Oliver Payne. I am from the RIPE meeting tech team. This is going to be a very quick summary of how the RIPE 81 meeting went for us from a technical perspective, and yeah, it's pretty much it.
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What you can see from this table, the biggest thing to take away is the fact that, over the course of the meeting ‑ we don't have today's figure yet ‑ over the course of this meeting, more people actually switched over to using the Meetecho platform, percentage‑wise, compared to using the live stream. This is great because it meant meant that, using the Meetecho platform itself, people could participate in the conversations as opposed to just live‑streaming, so it's good to see that, percentage‑wise, more people moved over to Meetecho.
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Here are some more numbers. There were over three months of data live streams to the viewers over the the course of this week. Just over a third of that was over IPv6. As you can see from the table on the right, that the Netherlands was the biggest consumer in terms of the data, that's probably mostly due to me testing the stream endlessly, and, from the table on the bottom left, you can see that there are still a lot of Windows users amongst us.
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So, let's talk about Meetecho.
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This is a pretty standard setup for any large‑scale conference streaming platform. It's a load‑balanced. There are lots of machines in the back end making sure that the right people get the right video streams at the right time and then you have a sort of overarching mixer room to make sure video is being sent to the platform and being sent from the platform are going into the right places.
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This is what we thought it would look like. Unfortunately, on Tuesday, it looked a bit more like this. So let's talk about Tuesday.
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Just to begin, there was no hard limit of 400 people during the ‑‑ built into the platform. It just so happened that 400 was around the limit where the server started to suffer. The main cause for that was the fact that, as more people joined, we had an underlying issue that increased the time it took for the servers to respond to the requests for the clients to join. Normally that's fine, because it would just take a bit longer, but in our case the clients would actually time‑out and rerequest a new connection, and, in that case, the server was processing not only the first request to make sure that the client had everything they needed but also in the meantime had received a second request from the same clients to reconnect and thereby double the load. And you can see from the graph, the tiny graph in the bottom right, that on Tuesday, compared to our standard load of about 15,000 to 20,000 requests per hour, we had managed to DDoS ourselves up to an amount of just over 800,000 requests per hour.
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In the end, the quick fix on Tuesday, which you can see when the dip comes in, is due to us increasing the time‑out for the clients so they had more time for the server to complete the connection. Of course that's not fixing the underlying cause, which the Meetecho team were available to and enabled ‑‑ able, they were able to identify the issue on Tuesday evening and we had a chat with them on Wednesday morning, they seemed confident in their fix. We were confident in their confidence, and therefore carried on with Meetecho.
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After Tuesday, we had a few more cases here and there, mostly due to people's Internet connections, browsers that people use, some of them were quite paranoid browsers blocking things that weren't expected to be blocked by the platform. That's fine. That's our problem, not yours, this should work with as many browsers as possible. Thank you everybody who provided feedback during this week for debugging those particular browser issues.
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And on to the good stuff.
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This is the first time in a single RIPE meeting that we have been able to all collaborate together online using an open source platform. Meetecho does publish the source code for their conference system, it's called Janus, go and check it it it out, it's written in C. There are a couple of benefits to using Meetecho compared to other platforms before. The main two were the fact that we didn't need any software installed on our machines to participate in the meeting. That's great, especially for people who participate in the meeting who don't have administrative access to their machines, if they are company‑issued machines or if there are restrictions on their machines, just go to the website, log in and off you go.
The other great thing is the fact that there were no regional restrictions to using Meetecho, so no matter where you were in the world, you could join and participate in RIPE 81. So how did it go? After Tuesday, we thought it went much better. We really do thank everybody's feedback for this.
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Thank you to everybody here who has helped throughout the week and the countless faces who I couldn't fit on this slide who also helped, especially the web services team, they were all very helpful for the whole week.
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The last thing I'd like to say is that there are still many of you who we haven't heard from, and we would really like your feedback to let us know how you thought the platform went and the whole meeting in general, but mostly from a technical perspective, what we can do better, what you liked, what you would like to see next time, and you will receive an e‑mail shortly to invite you to give feedback. And with that, I will take any questions.
BRIAN NISBET: Thank you very much, Oliver, and personally, I know, and I think I can speak for some of the PC and things, the Meetecho ‑ I must stop calling it Meetecho [pronunciation] ‑ the Meetecho experience was a great improvement on RIPE 80, onwards and upwards. So thank you very much for that. If we have a few people in the queue, I think Dmitry was there first.
DMITRY: A quick question or suggestion, perhaps we need a feedback button or maybe prominent simple forum on the RIPE meeting site put all of their Meetecho complaints in an order. Maybe even a simple Meetecho at ripe.net e‑mail, because there are many issues I keep encountering them, we are improving the platform as we go. That's fine.
OLIVER PAYNE: We have the dedicated tech team e‑mail address which we will make sure is much more readily published in the next meeting.
DMITRY: Maybe even put it on the live streaming website or the main page as well, you know.
OLIVER PAYNE: Noted. Thank you.
BRIAN NISBET: I will remind people again, even though we're at the end of the meeting, please state your name and affiliation before asking a question. I think, Elvis, you are next.
ELVIS VELEA: Hi, I think actually Piotr was next, okay. Can you go to slide number 4 for a second, please. So, from my experience, it's sent like the audio bridge caps basically using frames, and to appoint where the socket was terminated and the page would reload. And I kept getting that throughout the whole week. Tuesday afternoon was great, but ‑‑ yeah, most of the week I think I had dozens of reloads everyday. This has something to do with the fact that I am on the other coast ‑‑ the other side of the world, I don't know. I am sure Meetecho does use some sort of a Cloud thing to make this work.
OLIVER PAYNE: Yeah, we did find that it was not quite as stable as we had hoped with intermittent Internet connections. If you had either a connection that was dropping packets or unable to complete all the transmissions that we expected it to, it wasn't quite as smooth as we expected. This feedback has already gone back to the Meetecho team and I know for a fact they are looking into what they can improve for the next time. But thank you.
ELVIS VELEA: Sometimes this would also be triggered by just someone sharing a screen and the ops transmit that go to me, I would start having frames and dropouts in audio and stuff like that and eventually it would reload again.
OLIVER PAYNE: Can you potentially write this all down and send this to us in an e‑mail. As I said, we want to collect as much data as possible to see where we can improve. So, if you have generic technical feedback, please write down as much as you can, provide as much information and we would really appreciate it.
ELVIS VELEA: Sure, I'll put it an e‑mail. And actually, the platform is pretty cool.
OLIVER PAYNE: Thank you.
BRIAN NISBET: And Piotr.
PIOTR STRZYZEWSKI: First of all, thanks for the presentation. That's a very cool one. The other thing is that I like Dmitry's description that it's mythical complaints the name of the page, but that pretty much explains his attitude and I like it very much.
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Anyway, I have three things to mention. The first is that there should be a better, much better support for the mobile Chrome on Android and the other platforms. Right now, it's crap. It makes a lot of trouble. And if you are limiting ourselves to just one browser in one environment, virtual environment, then this literally a problematic situation.
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The other thing that a lot of people all right mentioned in the chat, that the SpatialChat was great as well and there was no information in your presentation about that.
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I have a question about the bandwidth. I found it really, really bandwidth consuming, even right now I'm looking at Meetecho screen, which is quite static, and it's ‑‑ the bandwidth according to the Meetecho jumps close to 500 kbps and watching you as you are moving together with Brian, it's like 250 kbps, so for me I cannot understand how static slide is consuming the same amount of traffic as two of you moving and being more dynamic. So do you have any composition of the bandwidth consumed by Meetecho compared to Zoom? And the reason for that question is I was most of the time I was using the mobile connection and I saw the counter on my mobile and it was consuming enormous amount of traffic and I am not expecting this amount of traffic to be consumed by any conference software, you name any one of the leading ones, and they are not using this amount of traffic. So do you have ‑‑
BRIAN NISBET: We don't have all morning, unfortunately, to talk about this. I think that's ‑‑ these are questions, but we do have to move on with the meeting. So, Oliver, I don't know if you have any quick reactions to that?
OLIVER PAYNE: I can do them very quickly in reverse. First of all, Zoom, as an example, uses a proprietary system to organise the packets and the videos that sent. We're now using the open WebRTC standard which is currently is not as bit efficient as it could be in terms of serving static images because it doesn't handle variable bit rates very well yet, yet is the key.
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Secondly, to the SpatialChat, we don't have any figures on that today, but if there are some figures that we can give and say how useful it was and what people thought about it and also how much it was used by the community, we will try to publish those.
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And the last point, or the first for you, of browser compatibility is a huge, and was and still continues to be a huge focus for us, because we don't want to restrict people to any specific browser at all. Unfortunately, WebRTC is still quite a statue standard for browsers to incorporate natively, and we had to make some compromises for this meeting, hopefully not for the next one.
BRIAN NISBET: Thank you very much. And the mic seems to have disappeared from the queue, so we'll finish up.
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I think, speaking purely for myself, I'd love to not now ‑‑ but if we use it again, I'd love to hear more about the experience with Meetecho even from a vendor relations point of view, I know that's a Cloud service there, but something slightly behind the curtain as well on that new platform, but, as I said, not now, and I know it's a different situation.
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So, thank you very much, Oliver, and thank you to all of the team for facilitating us in having this meeting this week.
OLIVER PAYNE: Thank you, Brian.
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(Virtual applause)
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And with that, that ends the Plenary from our point of view.
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So I will now hand back to Mirjam before any other screens are shared by mysterious people, but I will hand back to Mirjam for closing remarks. Thank you very much.
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MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you, Brian.
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Just the very last bit of the RIPE 81 Plenary session for my part. Before I forget, I would also really like to thank the RIPE NCC Events Team for providing this ‑‑ for organising this meeting, I mean it's an amazing experience, with SpatialChat and also last night the special Halloween edition of SpatialChat for the dinner, that was really cool, and everything, for my part, just worked very smoothly after the glitch at the Opening Plenary, but, apart from that, I think it was a great experience, and obviously as you just heard, you know, we'll work more to improve the platform in the future.
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Now, just a few numbers to show you. 1,224 registered for the meeting. So you can see reusing the slides very efficiently from last time. This, of course, 82 participation, over that have 1,224 registered attendees. An average of 1,000 viewers per day on the platform, you just saw some numbers also from Oliver. People from 85 countries participated. And the top three countries, maybe not surprisingly, are Germany, Netherlands and Great Britain, the UK.
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Thanks again to all the Working Groups that have run their sessions during this week. There were two Working Group Chair selections going on, but there are no new additions to the team because the former chairs were reselected, which is also great. So, welcome again.
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And again, also, a big thanks to the Programme Committee who put together the Plenary session.
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Two of the PC members have decided to step down. That was Maria Isobel and Alireza, thank you very much for participating in the PC over the last few years and for your contributions (clap clap clap) and we, as Brian just announced, we have two members on the Programme Committee for the next couple of years and they are Fernando and Mohammad, and so welcome to the Programme Committee.
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And another announcement is Herve Clement has been reappointed for another term for the NRO numbers Council for a term of another two years, so, welcome back, Herve.
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And just for the records, for those who couldn't be there, this is just a slide of the agenda of the Community Plenary. I do believe it's important to have space for this kind of community interactions and tasks, and I also heard from many of you that maybe we need even more time for high level or overarching topics that maybe don't have a space in any of the Working Groups, so we will see how we can further extend on that.
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And another big thanks to the trusted contacts, I have just mentioned that also in the Community Plenary, we are looking for new candidates, and I would like to just mention this actually is a standing item in the Closing Plenary, is to give a report about what happened, and again this should be in RIPE 82, when the report was received during this meeting and I have some notes here, I want to read it out, is that the trusted contacts have informed the RIPE Chair about one report of an incident during RIPE 81, what am I thinking ‑‑ this is 81, 82 is coming, I am already in the future ‑‑ we are in 81. So, a report of an incident during this meeting which caused some offence and was an incident involving use of video material previously used at RIPE 68 which had some offensive connotations, and nobody involved in the selection of the use of this material was aware of these connotations. The incident was brought to the attention of the RIPE NCC events team, and an apology was promptly given which the RIPE Chair team would like to join this apology, and we hope that solves this issue.
This was the one report that was reported to the trusted contacts this time. And before I make any other embarrassing mistakes, I'll leave it at that. This is again the Chair team, Niall and myself, and you can contact us with at these e‑mail addresses, and please, as mentioned earlier, provide feedback via the feedback forum, and finally, the sponsors I would like to thank them again because they also made it possible to provide this new platform and these new tools that we have been using for this RIPE meeting.
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And last but not least, as usually, there are some prizes.
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I'm not going to hand them over here on the stage as usual, but please, we will contact you all by e‑mail. So, a big virtual applause to the winners of the prizes of the first virtual registration is Kurt Kaiser, as the first newcomer; also Nadira Al Araj, for rating the presentations, you also have prizes, so it's worth rating them, and then all the Kahoot winners each day also win a prize. I'm not going to read them all out here.
There is one more Kahoot after this Closing Plenary so you could be the last winner of the week and also congratulations to all the bingo winners last night and thanks to Alistair for running this, this was great fun.
Usually, I would say see you all again in May? A location. But, we'll have to be a little careful here, we don't know exactly yet if you are going, if you're not going. Obviously we still have hope that we will see you all again in person in May between the 17th and 21st May 2021 at the actual physical RIPE meeting, but we will make a decision as soon as possible, but please block your dates and the RIPE 82 website is up already. So you can ‑‑ or it will be up shortly, you can go there for more information.
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And that's me. Sorry for this wobbly Closing Plenary, and I'll wish you all a good weekend.
ERIK BAIS: Mirjam, you missed the stenography team.
MIRJAM KUHNE: I missed the stenography team. How could I have? Thanks to the stenographers, we couldn't live without them. Yes, absolutely.
ERIK BAIS: They did a great job. Thanks.
MIRJAM KUHNE: You are right. It's even more challenging, I think, in this virtual environment but I think it helped a lot. You're right. Thank you.
(End of RIPE 81)
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