ENOG 14/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting took place October 9-10, 2017 in Minsk (Belarus). A total of 216 attendees participated in the event, 94 of them from Belarus. The meeting also saw attendees from Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Germany, the Netherlands, Moldova, Great Britain, and Czech Republic – in total, from 18 countries.
The meeting was hosted by the RIPE NCC and Hoster.by and sponsored by ISOC (gold sponsor).
ENOG PC Chair Sergey Myasoedov opened the meeting, which immediately led to the tutorials. Tutorial 1, DNSSEC Operator’s Guide, was run by Philipp Kulin (DIPHOST). Tutorial 2, Best Practices in IPv6 BGP, was run by Nathalie Trenaman and Massimiliano Stucchi from the RIPE NCC.
The formal opening of ENOG 14 followed the tutorials. Serge Radovcic (RIPE NCC) introduced Nigel Titley and Dmitry Burkov, the RIPE NCC Executive Board members in attendance, and Hans Petter Holen, the RIPE Chair. Serge also highlighted the attendance statistics and also thanked the sponsors of the event.
Sergey Povalishev (founder and CEO of Hoster.by) then thanked the attendees and noted that ENOG 14 opened The Internet Week in Belarus. Finally, Sergey Myasoedov reviewed the agenda of ENOG 14 and drew attention to ENOG’s various communication channels (including the unofficial Facebook group and Telegram channel).
Axel Pawlik, (RIPE NCC Managing Director) described the role of the RIPE NCC and mentioned RIPE NCC activities in Belarus and in the sub-region as a whole, accentuating the organisation’s external engagement activities and Memoranda of Understanding with third parties. Axel went on to present an overview of RIPE NCC services to its membership and to the Internet community at large, including various fellowship programmes, Internet measurement and statistical services and online learning tools. Axel ended with a call for the attendees to provide feedback concerning the ENOG meeting and the services of the RIPE NCC.
Axel was asked that the RIPE NCC provide a way to distribute RIPE Atlas credits among a group of registered LIRs. Referring to the RIPE NCC’s support of IPv6 deployment, Bakhrom Nasirjanov (TT Mobile company) suggested a method of encouraging IPv6 deployment would be to follow the app store model of requiring of IPv6 compatibility in all apps. Axel replied that IPv6 deployment is a business decision and that the RIPE NCC is trying to encourage deployment. Another audience member suggested to Axel that the RIPE NCC pursue a policy of communication with the Chinese government to ensure devices manufactured in China include IPv6 compatibility. Axel replied that the RIPE NCC has little influence on the Chinese government but it would happily collaborate with APNIC to support IPv6 deployment in the region.
For a second time (after ENOG 13 in Saint-Petersburg), Internet measurements and statistics became the most popular presentation topic. The first talk on this topic, “Country View on Belarus with Regional Context” was presented by Christian Teuschel (RIPE NCC). Christian analysed the dynamics of the Internet development in Belarus and neighbouring countries using RIPE NCC data sets and correlated it with the economic data for those countries. He showed that there are fallouts from trends for Belarus. He also presented the new project by the RIPE NCC, the Country Statistics Reports.
Christian was asked if the country reports function could be used to produce similar reports for the Russian market. He replied that his presentation featured the prototype of a more extensive function that would be presented at the upcoming RIPE Meeting.
Oleg Muravskiy (RIPE NCC) gave an update on the RIPE NCC Routing Information Service (RIS). He described the structure of the service and its goals, presented the architecture evolution from 1999 and the operation procedures, explained how the gathered data can be accessed in different ways (including the integration into RIPEstat) and made a live demo. He mentioned publications on RIPE Labs made on the basis of RIS. At the end of the talk, he urged those wishing to join the project and explained how to do it. When Oleg was asked about the maximum request limit for RIPEstat, Christian Teuschel replied that the only limit is no more than eight concurrent requests at a time.
Alexander Asimov (Qrator Labs) in his lightning talk, “Measurement as a Key for Transparency”, expressed the idea that Internet measurements can be valuable for customers choosing competitive services, and illustrated his point by comparing several anonymised anti-DDoS services using RIPE Atlas measurements.
Gael Hernandez (Packet Clearing House) presented his results of analysing almost two million interconnection agreements from 2016 in comparison with analogous results from 2011. He noted that countries with fewer numbers of regulations (USA, Canada, Finland) are more popular for peering; more regulated countries (Russia, Ukraine, Romania) are less popular; and highly regulated countries (China, Thailand) usually are not selected as points to peer.
Egor Drobyshev, in his presentation “Observing Russian Exchange Points Through Looking Glass” explained the techniques to gather some important Internet Exchange Points’ (IXP) indicators like number of ASes participating, the size of common participants between different IXPs and number of routing announces between them.
Another presentation following the popular ENOG topic of peering and IXPs, “Detecting Peering Infrastructure Outages”, was presented by Christoph Dietzel (DE-CIX). Christoph introduced DE-CIX’s technology for outage monitoring, detection, disambiguation and localisation and subsequent measurement of the impact of outages. He also pointed out that most affected parties seem to not report the majority of outages.
IPv6 remains one of the most popular subjects of discussions. Denis Mikhlevich (JSC “Volgatranstelecom”, ENOG Fellow), in his lightning talk “IPv6 Implementation in TTK-Volga network”, shared his operational experience of IPv6 deployment. Jan Zorz (Internet Society) showed the results obtained in the Go6lab (Slovenia) testing NAT64 and DNS64 approaches and showed different existing operational issues. He proposed using the tool NAT64Check, by Go6lab, to reveal them.
Martin Levy (Cloudflare) described how Cloudflare encouraged all customers to migrate to IPv6 and demonstrated the significant consequences on the world scale, and gave some numbers concerning IPv6 penetration depending on the operating systems, device types, and geography. He also covered the DNSSEC and TLS 1.3 deployment on Cloudflare platforms. Another presentation devoted to DNS, “Building and Operating a Global DNS anycast Network”, was made by Gael Hernandez. He described the structure of DNS-anycast network by PCH (D-root and E-root DNS servers) and explained the operational and architectural considerations in this network.
A lightning talk by Taras Geychenko (Hostmaster LLC) depicted the situation with RDAP protocol (the replacement of the obsolete WHOIS protocol) and multi-language information. Taras admitted that there are still some issues with the language recognition that need to be resolved.
The theme of routing also featured at the meeting. Kirill Malevanov (Selectel) reported the challenges they encountered during the unintentional hijacking of their prefix by another operator, and rolled out his view how to address this in the future. Alexander Azimov made a short message that BGPSec has finally changed the status from “Internet draft” to “RFC”, and explained why it is important. The only talk dedicated to security (“Operating a Secure Network (Effects of encryption)”) came from by Ignas Bagdonas (Equinix). Ignas focussed on the aftermath of total encryption deployment for the different network technologies, revealed common trends, described IETF efforts in addressing the issues, and urged discussion on the subject.
A new subject for ENOG was the Internet of Things (IoT). Carsten Bormann (Universität Bremen TZI, IETF CoRE WG, IRTF T2T RG) presented the history of IoT and brought forward the idea of the importance of Internet Protocol for IoT. His presentation also analysed current deployment models and protocols, and concluded that security is the real key to IoT evolution. At the end of the first day, a BoF session devoted to IoT was run by Alex Semenyaka (RIPE NCC), who presented the description of IoT activities inside the RIPE community and predicted the creation of an IoT Working Group at the RIPE 75 Meeting in Dubai. Anton Baskov shared his view of the importance of IoT technologies for operators’ business. This was followed by a lively discussion with the main conclusions of the importance of hardware vendors’ involvement and the crucial role of protocol unification.
Anton Makarov (Gateflow) presented on SDN technology, highlighting his work “Telco Transport SDN: lessons learned”, that described why the initial SDN approaches to transport networks failed and how SDN is becoming increasingly used in large telcos.
The last hot topic was the discussion of content in-transit blocking. It began with the panel session, “Impact of content blocking on internet infrastructure”. At the beginning of the panel, Alex Semenyaka stated several axioms that allow making the discussion fruitful (no politics; there are some cases when blocking could be appropriate measure; the scope of blocking should be reasonable and should not break the human and civil rights). Also, he presented the overview of the content blocking practices in different countries and documents, created by different bodies (e.g. The General Assembly of UN, The European Court of Human Rights, Council of Europe, OSCE, ISoC, IETF, EFF).
Philipp Kulin described the current blocking practices in Russia, construed the systematic mistakes made by regulators and the problems emerging due to these mistakes. He mentioned possible evolution paths of these practices and warned concerning the consequences for the business of operators.
The next speaker, Artyom Gavrichenkov (Qrator Labs), explained the technical complexity of DPI deployment in a high-bandwidth transport network. Anton Baskov, also on the panel, expressed confidence that the effectiveness of in-transit content blocking is low, and will become lower still, illustrating the idea with the accepted and developing Internet standards. He concluded that the only way to enforce such blocking is the pervasive monitoring deployment that will be a very heavy economic burden for the Internet industry. He made the conclusion that the most efficient way to achieve the goals of such blocking is the combination of simple technical approaches with operational-search activities and investigations by Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs).
At the end of the session, Yuri Kargapolov rolled out the list of the administrative issues, created by the necessity of the Internet blocking, speculated on the cost of addressing them, and asserted the necessity to minimise actions taken on the Internet and maximise the actions taken in real life to increase the effectiveness of these intentions.
Alexander Isavnin, together with Oleksii Samorukov, presented the talk “The Collateral Damage of Internet Censorship”. He analysed, in short, content blocking from the point of view of the IP network architecture and described in detail their view on the damage created by current blocking practices in Russia. He urged the community to self-organise to prevent this damage.
ENOG 14 saw the introduction of the ENOG Fellowship programme, launched by the RIPE NCC. There were four Fellows selected: Kristina Hakobyan, Ucha Seturi, Bahrom Nasirdjano and Denis Mikhlevich. All of them actively participated in the discussion from the floor, and Denis Mikhlevich prepared the lightning talk, highly appreciated by the audience.
The meeting presentations were given in English and Russian. On-site translation facilities were provided to attendees. The presentations are available in the archive and session videos in both English and Russian are available on the ENOG YouTube Channel.
The ENOG 15/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting will take place in Moscow, Russia on 4-5 June 2018.
