Daily Meeting Report

Tuesday, 27 October

Our second fully virtual RIPE Meeting welcomed 1,166 registered attendees from 80 countries.

The day began with the Newcomers’ Introduction session led by RIPE Chair Mirjam Kühne and Vice Chair Niall O’Reilly. As always, this is a crash course on everything RIPE and RIPE NCC (and hopefully provides a better picture of the difference between the two!) We tested newcomers with a Kahoot! quiz and handed out the first of the coveted official RIPE 81 t-shirts as prizes!

Mirjam gearing up to chair RIPE 81

Mirjam officially opened RIPE 81 in the Opening Plenary, with a few words from Hans Petter Holen, RIPE NCC Managing Director and Franziska Lichtblau, RIPE Programme Committee Chair. Susan Forney, Hurricane Electric presented interesting statistics about RPKI adoption in IPv6. Oliver Gasser spoke about the impact of COVID-19 on Internet traffic. We had some teething problems with our new conference platform, and Oliver gave it his best shot despite technical issues. Thanks Oliver, our apologies for your interrupted presentation and a big (virtual!) round of applause for your presentation!

The rest of day one flew by once we got Meetecho back up and running. Geoff Huston shared his findings from his latest RPKI measurement experiment, and the new RIPE Labs editor, Alun Davies, gave a short lightning talk about what you can expect to see from Labs in the coming months. Nico Schottelius provided insights into NAT64 with P4, and Robert Kisteleki followed with a lightning talk on the 10 years of RIPE Atlas. Fun fact: RIPE Atlas was originally called DAR, which may or may not stand for ‘Daniel and Robert’. You’ll have to ask Robert to find out!

Wondering when we can move to IPv6-only networks? Watch Jen Linkova’s presentation and ask her about how not to break a treadmill. Massimo Candela reported on a current IETF draft proposal to make it easy to find authoritative geolocation information in a standardised format. We’ve heard of centralisation the Internet, but what does it mean when DNS traffic is centralised? Giovane Moura presented on this question, followed by a lightning talk by Boris Mimeur on MANRS research group initiatives.

If you missed any sessions – the recordings and presentations are available on the presentation archives!

While this sounds like a day full of serious business – there were lighter moments! The king of Kahoot! Gerardo Viviers showed off his sound effect skills while asking some tough questions about IPv6 security. We also invited attendees to stretch with Lenka – RIPE NCC’s management assistant and stretching coach to get re-energised for the afternoon. And finally we wrapped up the evening with informal ‘Meet the RIPE Chair and Vice Chair’ and ‘Meet the RIPE NCC Executive Board’ sessions.

Is Day One over then? Not entirely – for anyone who feels like catching up with old acquaintances or getting to know new ones, the lobby bar, pub, poolside, and fireside on SpatialChat are just a click away!

And here are some of our favourite tweets from today:

And we liked Eileen’s tweet so much that we’re sending her a t-shirt for having the #RIPE81 Tweet of the Day!

Yes Erik, our sympathies…

And well-timed Micheal!

Wednesday, 28 October

Wednesday was all about the RIPE Working Group (WG) sessions – here’s a summary:

Address Policy WG

Petrit Hasani ran through the current policy topics across the five RIRs. At the end of his presentation, he noted that he was stepping back from his Policy Development Officer role, with Angela Dall’Ara taking over – thanks for the support Petrit!
Nicholas Pediaditis shared feedback from the RIPE NCC’s Registry Services Department on several topics including inconsistent status hierarchies in the database, IPv4 run-out and IPv6 stockpiling.
The session finished with an update from Ciaran Byrne, RIPE NCC Legal Counsel, who reported on the recent seizure of IP addresses registrations for the recovery of money.

DNS WG

João Damas was re-elected as co-Chair for another term. Congrats João!
Anand Buddhdev gave an update on the RIPE NCC’s DNS activities.
Geoff Huston gave a really entertaining presentation about Query Name Minimisation and Andrew Campling closed the session with an update on Encrypted DNS.

Connect WG

Barry O’Donovan shared the success story of INEX’s IXP Manager, which received a lot of positive feedback from participants.
Luca Cicchelli presented on the peering history of Telecom Italia.
Bijal Sanghani talked about Euro-IX’s diversity efforts and shared some lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cooperation WG

Maxim Burtikov covered the trend of ‘sovereign Internet’ regulation in Russia, but highlighted that this is not unique to Russia – it is part of a wider trend towards digital sovereignty. The trust model the Internet is coming under greater scrutiny today. A question for the industry is whether it wants to step in to fill the vacuum or leave this up to governments.
Andrei Robachevsky spoke about a new framework developed by ISOC called the ‘Internet Way of Networking’ (IWN) that outlines five essential properties of the Internet which underpinned its success that regulators should avoid disrupting.
Peter and Marco discussed whether EU net neutrality regulation, or regulation in general, should play a role in motivating people to deploy IPv6. They highlighted that talks of regulation would not be happening if the community fixed the issue itself.

MAT WG

Andra Lutu presented on an inbound roamers study and Raffaele Zullo presented on another study that investigated whether UDP Options can be safely deployed.
Alex Ulmer presented a prototype of ProBGP, a tool which provides a geographical approximation of BGP Update Paths.
Robert Kisteleki gave a quick update on RIPE NCC tools and announced that RIPE Atlas is ten years old! Also, RIPE Atlas data is now available in Google Big Query and RIPEstat has a new interface, which will be demonstrated on Thursday.

RIPE NCC Services WG

Hans Petter Holen, RIPE NCC Managing Director, gave the RIPE NCC update, which focused on sanctions, changes in the Internet landscape, COVID-19 and internal restructuring.
Felipe Victolla Silveira, Chief Operations Officer, explained the main operational challenges facing the organisation and how they are being tackled.
Fergal Cunningham, Acting Chief Communications Officer, shared their translation strategy that will see more content being provided in Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Spanish and Italian in the future.
Sergey Myasoedov presented the results from the Executive Board Elections Task Force report.

The day ended with the General Meeting for RIPE NCC members.

Tomorrow, we will start Day Three with the Anti-Abuse WG session at 10:00 (UTC+1) – see you there!

Here are some of our favourite tweets from today:

Great initiative İlteriş. You’ve just won tweet of the day!

Important topic, thanks for sharing Nurani.

Another good reason to hang out on SpatialChat!

Thursday, 29 October

Thursday was another busy day with 1,212 attendees registered, 564 unique Meetecho viewers, and 540 unique viewers on the live stream. The day was full of RIPE Working Group (WG) sessions, demos, discussions and updates on services and technical tools. Check out the summary of the day:

Anti-Abuse WG

Brian Nisbet, WG Chair, opened the session by thanking Petrit Hasani for the work he has been doing as the RIPE NCC’s Policy Development Officer (PDO) and welcomed Angela dall’Ara as the new PDO.
The Policy Proposal 2019-04, Validation of “abuse-mailbox” did not reach a consensus and was therefore withdrawn.
A discussion followed on the need for a standard format of reporting abuse as well as requiring additional documentation and training on abuse handling.

Routing WG

Job Snijders and Sasha Romijn presented the Internet Routing Registry daemon (IRRd) software which interfaces with multiple IRRs and can be used to both publish and consume routing information. They recently released IRRd 4.1 which introduced RPKI validation to the IRR ecosystem and talked about the upcoming IRRd 4.2 which will include a new interface based on GraphQL.
Nathalie Trenaman shared the RPKI Resiliency project that includes operational, RFC and security compliance, the development of an audit framework and steps being taken to improve the resiliency of RPKI repositories.

RIPEstat

The RIPEstat team hosted a parallel event during lunch break where they showed participants the platform’s new UI and asked for their feedback.

IPv6 WG

Tim Clown talked about updating the document ripe-554 “Requirements for IPv6 in ICT Equipment” (that is now 8 years old) and asked the WG to send feedback in the mailing list on how this document should be updated with regards to content and structure.
Nico Schottelius presented on how you can bring IPv6 everywhere. In his presentation, he highlighted and demonstrated VIIRB, the VPN IPv6 IoT Router Box.
Fernando Gont shared recent improvements in IPv6 addressing, highlighting recent updates and developments to the relevant RFCs. After giving an update on the implementation status of RFC 7217 (and arguing that it has already become mainstream), he focused on RFC 4941 that has been receiving attention lately.

IoT WG

Marco Hogewoning shared a RIPE NCC IoT Update and mentioned that there are a number of EU legislative proposals in the works that will impact IoT.
The WG discussed a document on what CPE can do to help make IoT devices safer.
The WG Chairs will publish a survey on the IoT-WG and RIPE-list mailing lists to gather feedback from the community on what should the IoT WG be focusing on.

Open Source WG

Martin Winter and Ondrej Filipwill will continue as WG Co-Chairs.
Nathalie Trenaman talked about the life cycle of the RIPE NCC RPKI Validator and the RIPE NCC’s future plans to phase out the tool by July 2021. In the meantime, they released v3.2 yesterday (28 October) and asked operators to update to this version.
Alexander Zubkov presented on the Birdist Cookbook.
The session ended with a discussion on if and how they can improve the WG during these times of virtual meetings.
On 25 November, the RIPE NCC will be hosting a RIPE Atlas Deployathon where operators are invited to install 10×10 RIPE Atlas software probes over 10 hours.

Database WG

Following an operational update on the RIPE Database from Ed Shryane (RIPE NCC), Denis Walker (DB-WG Chair) went through the RIPE Database Working Group’s current Numbered Working Items (NWIs).
Sander Buskens (RIPE NCC) talked the audience through cloud migration plans for the RIPE NCC’s Whois service. After looking at the preparation and testing carried out by the RIPE NCC Database team so far, Sander invited the audience to try out the test environment and told them to expect production rollout in the first half of 2020. Sander received a number of questions, many revolving around the choice of AWS as cloud provider, but no major objections were raised.

The day will end with a night of horrors including virtual bingo, a “monster” playlist, RIPEtinis, spooky Halloween costumes, and prizes! Join the RIPE Dinner on SpatialChat.

To keep up with what’s happening at RIPE 81, follow @RIPEMeeting on Twitter and use the #RIPE81 hashtag.

These are some of our favourite tweets of the day:

Kudos on the great idea!

Great craftsmanship here, Ave! We love the creativity today.

Glad to see our RIPE 81 attendees are also loving Lenka’s stretching breaks.

Second day of live music on SpatialChat! Today, a virtual jam session took place by the fireplace.

Friday, 30 October

Friday was all about the RIPE Community – here’s a summary:

RIPE Community Plenary

Mirjam Kühne and Niall O’Reilly, the new RIPE Chair and Vice Chair, hosted the RIPE Community Plenary for the first time. Mirjam laid out the RIPE Chair Activities and the Roadmap.
The first part of the plenary’s agenda was packed with interesting reports from the RIPE Requirements Task Force, Code of Conduct Task Force and an update from Mirjam on the RIPE WG Chairs Collective Document. The session had a slow start due to the infamous RIPE Meeting “Friday Morning” syndrome but ended with interesting discussions from the community.
Daniel Karrenberg presented a short report from the NomCom, the full report will be published soon. It was agreed that the NomCom website will be preserved.
Hervé Clément, on behalf of the ASO AC, called for the community to nominate people for the upcoming selection for ICANN Board seat 9, which will be filled by the ASO AC. Additionally, he presented a report from the ASO AC.

Closing Plenary

Brian Nisbet, PC Vice Chair, announced that Mohamad Boroumand and Fernando García were elected for a four-meeting term.
Mirjam Kühne also announced that Hervé Clément was reappointed for another NRO NC term by the RIPE NCC Executive Board, which will officially start on 1 January 2021 and end on 31 December 2023.
Oliver Payne from the RIPE NCC shared the RIPE 81 Technical Report.
Mirjam chaired the Closing Plenary, noting that 1,224 people registered for RIPE 81, an average of +1,000 viewers tuned in daily, attendees came from 85 countries, with the top three countries being Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Yesterday’s Virtual RIPE Dinner

Back to yesterday, we ended the day with a night of horrors including virtual bingo, a “monster” playlist, RIPEtinis, spooky Halloween costumes, and prizes!

It all took place in this spooky setting: