ARIN Public Policy Meeting - October 18-19, 1999 [Archived]

For the morning session of day 2, the IP Allocation Policies Working Group and the Database Implementation Working Group (DBWG) met to discuss issues within their respective areas. Minutes of these meetings are posted on ARIN’s web site. In the afternoon, the plenary session reconvened for the two working groups to report on their meetings, and for other registries to make presentations.

RIPE NCC

First, John Crain explained the difference between RIPE and RIPE NCC. RIPE provides coordination services for the European community and does so through working groups, mailing lists, and hosting meetings.

RIPE NCC provides registry functions such as allocating IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and providing reverse delegation, database maintenance, and educational services. RIPE NCC is a nonprofit with 1,500 members and a staff of 57 professionals from 22 nationalities. John went on to provide statistics relating to their IP operations. The RIPE community has selected as their representatives to the ASO Address Council Sabine Jaume from France, Hans Petter Holen from Norway, and Wilfried Woeber from Austria. For further details about this RIR, visit the RIPE NCC presentation.

APNIC

Next, Paul Wilson provided a summary of APNIC’s IP-related statistics. Paul began with an overview of APNIC’s operations, explaining its interaction with confederations and National Internet Registries, as well as plans for hosting an iDNS server. APNIC has 354 members from 34 countries, and a staff of 13. To date, it has received seven IPv6 requests and has allocated five blocks. As the secretariat for the ASO during its first year of operation, APNIC is hosting the ASO web site.

LACNIC

German Valdez, a board member of the proposed LACNIC (www.lacnic.org), reported on the progress of the new registry’s formation. He commented on the presentation of a creation agreement at the Santiago meeting, that an interim board for the registry has been established, and the organization has gained the support of the ISPs, local IRs, telecom organizations, and carriers in its designated region, which is Latin America and the Caribbean. The location of its office will be decided at its general assembly which is expected to be held in early to mid-2000. Organizations representing the initial board will fund the registry during its start-up phase. Its operations will be divided by Brazil NIC and Mexican NIC, but this is not yet clearly defined. ARIN will be providing expertise and training support during early stages of its operations.

AFRINIC

After being introduced, Mouhamet Diop, from Senegal, provided an update of the formation of the proposed AFRINIC (www.afrinic.org). At it’s first meeting held in December 1998, a document for its formation was accepted. Mouhamet explained that the registry’s main objective is to become a neutral, transparent nonprofit organization assisting the African community, providing educational support, and developing public policies. The registry has presented a document to ICANN for recognition, elected a provisional board consisting of two each from: North, East, West, Central, Southern Africa, and the Indian Ocean, and is organizing its first general assembly. However, the country and location of the operation is yet to be selected. The RIRs were requested to form a technical committee to help determine where AFRINIC should be located and to help operationally during its startup phase.

IP Allocations Policies Working Group

The chair of this WG, Alec Peterson, described the group’s discussions on revising RFC 2050. One change involved revising end-user utilization guides from the current 25% immediate utilization and 50% utilization within 1 year, to 50% immediate utilization and 80% utilization within 1 year. They also discussed reclaiming address space and how or if it should be reclaimed. Under consideration was a lowering of the multi-homed requirement to /24 so that small entities that don’t qualify to receive IPs from ARIN under the current guidelines can receive address space. How this would affect the routing tables would have to be addressed. In conclusion, Cathy Wittbrodt will look at the /20s that have been allocated to check whether the routing tables are affected because of ARIN’s lowering of the allocation size from /19 to /20 this past February.

Database Implementation Working Group

Jeremy Porter, DBWG chair, explained that several issues have been under discussion, the first of which involves adding security and authentication to SWIP processing. Other topics included: mirroring top-level RWHOIS, integrating SWIP and RWHOIS so that in-addrs can be bundled with RWHOIS, developing a SWIP parser for members to verify data before submitting templates, changing SWIP parser from running once a day to running when an email is received, addressing the reuse of handles when a network is deleted, and expanding SWIP POC information. A show of hands revealed that a majority of the attendees use SWIP compared to RWHOIS. Minutes of their meeting will be posted to the members list. Regarding RWHOIS, Mark Kosters, who is developing RWHOIS at InterNIC, is putting patches on the initial version, and his staff will continue to develop it further. The question remains as to what should be done with version 2.

Future PPM Meetings

Comments about the 2-days’ events were very favorable - the meetings provided much needed education, and network access and wireless connections were pluses. Allowing for more time to hold working group discussions was one suggestion offered, while everyone resoundingly voiced a desire to have more fruit and ice cream! The majority of attendees expressed a desire to see the other RIRs continue to participate in each meeting.

In closing comments, possible hosts for the next public policy meeting in April 2000 were suggested. One final comment suggested that number exhaustion should be monitored, whereupon ARIN agreed to monitor IPs. The meeting was adjourned with an invitation from Kim for all those interested to join in the reception planned for the evening and a special thanks to Qwestfor hosting these activities.

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