The ENOG 17/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting took place online from 9-13 November 2020. The meeting was hosted by the RIPE NCC.
ENOG 17 saw 374 attendees checked in online from a total of 48 countries across the ENOG region and beyond. 172 of those attendees joined the meeting for the first time. The best represented country was Russia, with 153 attendees in total, followed by the Netherlands (19), Germany (19) and Ukraine (14).
Ahead of the Plenary sessions, there were two tutorials organised. The first tutorial explored how to analyse historical RIPE Atlas data and the second tutorial showed attendees how to troubleshoot BGP issues using RIS and RIPEstat.
ENOG 17 opened with a welcome speech from Alex Semenyaka (ENOG Programme Committee Chair) followed by a talk from the new RIPE Chair, Mirjam Kühne, who introduced herself to the ENOG community.
After this, Hans Petter Holen (RIPE NCC’s Managing Director) gave an update on current RIPE NCC activities. Among other news, he announced the launch of a language support initiative that will help translate more RIPE NCC documentation in non-English language including Russian.
Sergey Myasoedov presented the results from the Executive Board Elections Task Force report and announced that the task force’s recommendations were approved by the RIPE NCC Membership during the last General Meeting in October 2020. The new election rules will be effective from the next Executive Board election that will take place in May 2021. This will ensure that those who stand for the board have the right expertise and background.
Ending the first day of Plenary session, Alena Muravska (RIPE NCC) presented on managing IP resources and safety in a post IPv4 run-out world.
The second day of plenary sessions was all about measurements. Mikhail Anisimov (ICANN) presented on the Identifier Technology Health Indicators and how it helped with measuring the health of the DNS. His talk was followed by Alexander Ilyin (MSK-IX) who presented on the TLD Domain Monitoring System. The third presenter, Mikhail Klimarev, shared his research on the recent Belarus Internet shutdowns. He explained how a group of self-organised digital observers documented numerous shutdowns in the country. We were really proud to see that RIPE Atlas probes were used to track these outages. At the end of his talk, Mikhail invited community members to join as digital observers and collaborate across countries to help detect and prevent future shutdowns. His talk was followed by Alexander Isavnin who presented on the ISP data collected by the Russian government and the day ended with RACI’s recipient, Gereltsetseg Altangerel, who shared results from her study on IPv6 Transition Readiness in Mongolia.
Kevin Meynell (Internet Society) opened the third day of Plenary session by presenting on the MANRS Observatory. The tool allows participants to easily check for conformancy. It collates publicly available data sources, such as BGPStream, CIDR Report, PeeringDB, RIPE Database and RIPEstat, the RPKI Validator, IRRs and CAIDA Spoofer Database.
Paolo Lucente, pmacct, gave an introduction to pmacct, an open-source, independent, GPL’ed software collecting data from a large number of sources. It’s a 15-year-old project which is under active development. He also mentioned that pmacct is ready to scale horizontally and could eventually scale infinitely.
Alexander Azimov, Yandex, shared the status and plans with regards to BGP Security.
Closing this fourth day, Maria Kolesnikova (Coordination Center for TLD RU) discussed how the DNS has changed over the past decade. She also explained the importance of universal acceptance to build a digitally inclusive Internet.
The final day of ENOG 17 started with a presentation from our RACI attendee, Nicolas Schottelius (ETH Zurich) who presented on “High Speed Network Address Translation from IPv6 to IPv4 (NAT64) using Protocol 4 (P4)”. It’s no secret that IPv4 addresses are depleted worldwide and IPv6 addresses are on the rise. Nicolas talked about the available translation methods and focused on how P4, an independent programming language, could help bridge this gap.
The plenary session continued with Sergey Valov who shared test results from the Up/Down Transport Protocol (UDTP). Sergey started with explaining how the Internet works: the greater the latency and higher the packet losses, the lower the transmission speed. He introduced how UDTP aims to solve problems such as indefinite delay, jitter delays, traffic interference, and more, and compared the different characteristics between TCP, SCTP, FASP/udt, QUIC, and UDTP transport protocols.
On to the closing plenary, Alexander Isavsin (ENOG PC) and Alexey Uchakin (linkmeup) moderated a roundtable session on “Telecoms in a Time of Pandemic”. The world has changed due to the impact of COVID-19, particularly in terms of Internet traffic with a growth of 25%. We were able to see a booming increase in online gaming, online sales and a shift in remote education and learning. This has created new problems for different industries: as too many customers for some (e.g. Zoom’s market share), less revenue for others, troubles with logistics, deliveries and procurement, and a volatile exchange rate. In the ENOG region, many homes were not ready for this shift. People don’t have cable and phone lines as nowadays they have Internet at work, or they use their mobile phone. Small and medium business were also hit by the short-noticed lockdowns and they are still struggling today. Companies that rely on data centers, could not get people to travel and work at the physical locations.
The panel discussed these problems from different angles and made their prognoses for the future. It’s hard to estimate how long it’s going to take us to overcome these problems because this depends on how long this “lockdown” will be preserved. We’ve learned a lot of lessons from this change already – meetings got shorter, performance got better, working hours got reduced.
It’s certain that the world won’t go back to “how things were” because this state belongs in the past. People got used to working from home, doing their business online, learning and studying remotely, shopping online, so we need to be ready, sooner than ever, to meet their ever-demanding needs.
The meeting presentations discussed were given in English and Russian. Simultaneous translation was provided to attendees via the Meetecho platform. The presentations are available in the archives and session videos in both English and Russian are available on the ENOG YouTube Channel.
