Nibbles & Bits

Virtual RIPE 82 Conference Recap

by | May 28, 2021

RIPE 82 May 2021 Conference Header

For those of you who haven’t yet been, the RIPE conference was a five-day virtual event from May 17-21, 2021 where Internet Service Providers (ISPs), network operators, and industry leaders gathered to discuss the most important points of interest to the Internet community.

Day One

After the morning keynote, an afternoon full of informative plenary sessions followed. Nico Schottelius asked if we are ready to enter a post-IPv4 world (WE ARE) as fewer and fewer IPv4 addresses are available with every passing day. Patrik Fältström and Stephen Farrell discussed privacy in light of law enforcement’s ongoing debate around encryption solutions that could help them solve crimes but hinder our ability to protect personal information on devices like laptops or smartphones.

Geoff Huston gave a lively history of DNS which included talks on the original design, evolution, and how it has influenced our world today. He was followed by Daniel Wagner who touched up quickly on IPFIX protocol then went into detail about an export available to IXPs that may interest some community members.

It was announced that virtual childcare would be provided, which was a very cool resource for parents attending the conference with children at home! Kids could play and even learn to code online.

Day Two

The second day of RIPE 82 was bustling. Over 1,100 people attended and the Address Policy, Connect, Cooperation, and Open Source working groups got down to work with enthusiasm despite some having been up all night attempting to crack the RIPE 82 Cybersecurity Challenge…

The Open Source Working Group chairs made some waves with their daringly named session title “your favourite working group session.” If you did indeed miss your favorite working group session, then you definitely missed out on Alexander Zubkov’s presentation on his Mixtoolkit and an update from Marcos Sanz Grossón about IX-API which is a joint effort between AMS-IX, DE-CIX, and LINX. Frederic Loui also gave listeners an update about rare.freertr.net where he discussed how it would work in conjunction with other projects like DANE or TLSA.

Day Three

In the presentation “DNS Centrality: Resolvers”, Geoff Huston and João Damas reminded us that DNS is an essential part of everyday life. They focused on resolver data to answer questions like how many domains are there? Which ones are popular or not so much? What’s their size distribution? All to see if any countries dominate in terms of number domain registrations or maybe some organizations have a lot more clients than others, for example.

Anand Buddhdev from RIPE NCC presented recent updates about CDS Update Services, K-root service implementation status update, and DNSSEC deployment activities.

Hans Petter Holen (Managing Director) has been at the helm of the RIPE NCC for about a year, and he gave an update on organization structure, IPv4 runout, and ongoing work to standardize RIPE NCC platforms. Holen shared his experience after being Managing Director with members from all over Europe during a recent meeting in Dublin, Ireland. He mentioned that there are many challenges ahead but they’re committed to solving these problems together as an international community of networks.

Bert Hubert discussed the EU NIS 2 Directive over at #RIPE82. He said that this directive might potentially regulate all DNS root-servers and what this could mean for the industry.

Day Four

The presenter, Paolo Volpato, spoke next and discussed the status of IPv6 deployment. One attendee made an interesting point about how introducing IPv6 does not relieve pressure on the limited number of available IP (Internet Protocol) addresses because dual-stack is only a temporary solution. The real relief comes from migration to IPv6…

RIPE NCC’s Senior Technical Officer, Nathalie Trenaman spoke about the new RIPE NCC RPKI compliance and audit process. She spoke about developments including cloud deployment and deprecating the RPKI Validator in order to prepare it from being a legacy service provider. As part and parcel of #RIPE and the spirit of the conference, feedback was requested from the panel.

The day ended with a Eurovision-inspired evening of cocktails (mixology contest), a talent contest, and karaoke. Fun was had by all.

Day Five

According to the #RIPE82 conference recap itself, in the technical report it was noted that the conference Meetecho chat went down “not with a bang, but a giggle” from our very own Jan Žorž { message:”<giggle>”, at: 1621241766582, sender:“Jan Žorž”}! Mirjam Kühne, RIPE Chair, noted that after the BoF on Monday there was no clear consensus to form a new SCION WG. She encouraged those who were involved in this initiative to keep working with their community through existing channels and continue exploring ways of opening up a dialogue about the issues they feel are important.

In Summary

Although #RIPE82 was virtual, there was still a strong sense of community with so many industry giants coming together to discuss policy and the issues at hand. We’re not entirely sure if #RIPE83 this November will be in person again, but fingers crossed!

P.S. Congratulations to the survey winners!

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