March 1996 IEPG Meeting

Location: Los Angeles, Ca, USA

Date: Sunday, 3 March 1996

Meeting Chair: Elise Gerich

Minutes: Havard Eidnes

1. Introduction

Elise Gerich welcomed everyone to the meeting. Havard Eidnes volunteered to take notes and produce the minutes.

2. IXes and regional updates

Bill Manning re-announced that he is collecting Web pointers for info about Internet Exchange points. The current set is available from http://www.isi.edu/div7/ra/ep.html, send any updates and additions to bmanning@isi.edu.

2.1 The Amsterdam IX, Erik-Jan Bos

The AMS IX is currently constructed using switched ethernet and FDDI. The physical location is SARA at WCW in Amsterdam, NL. A second location at NIKHEF (also WCW) will soon be added, and extensions to a metro-area exchange will also probably happen soon. More information is available from http://www.ams-ix.net/.

2.2 The Packet clearinghouse, Bill Woodlock

The Packet clearinghouse appears to not be a "traditional IX", but more a cooperative of it's members with a CIX-like setup. It is constructed with a 10Mbit/s connection to MAE-WEST, with a local shared ethernet where colocate space is available, and one cisco-4000 providing the connection to MAE-WEST. The Packet clearinghouse started January 1995, and permits non-transit peering between its members. The current members are located in California LATA 1, and the membership count is 15 at present. More info available at http://hardhat.zocalo.net/pch.html, or from woody@zocalo.net.

2.3 The LINX, Bill Cessna

The London INternet eXchange is located at Telehouse in the Docklands in London, GB. It is currently organized as a "not-for- profit" company. The IX is currently constructed with switched ethernet, an upgrade to a combination of 100Mbit/s Ethernet and FDDI is on the way. The LINX currently has 19 members, a doubling over the 4 last months. The basic model is pure bilateral arrangements with "bring your own box" policy. See http://www.linx.net/linx/ for information on rules, regulations, procedures, MOU, and prices for the LINX.

2.4 SingNet/STIX, Lorna Leong

The Singapore Telecom Internet eXchange (STIX) is a "layer-three" interconnect, providing transit services for several networks in the Asia-Pacific region, some of them being in CN, JP, MY, SG, AU, PH, NP, IN (this is an incomplete list). The financial model is similar to a half-circuit model, and they have a T1 to ANS and an E1 to UUnet (as part of the Microsoft Network).

Peter Lothberg asked if he could put his own box on the STIX, it turned out that would not be possible unless PL's network was licensed to operate a network in Singapore (there only exists 3 licensed service providers there).

2.5 CERN Internet exchange

The CERN interconnect is built with FDDI and Ethernet. It is open to providers selling services to CERN and to providers in CH and FR. The fees are 1000 CFR/month. There is no AUP for the IX other than a requirement to use RIPE-181 to register announced routes in the RIPE database. More info in http://wwwcs.cern.ch/wwwcs/public/ip/cernixp.home.html.

2.6 Eugene, Oregon IX, Randy Bush

This IX is built with a shared FDDI ring. It currently connects the state education network and several commercial service providers. There is no name for the IX, no web page, and a basic "bring your box" policy. Contact is Dave Meyer, University of Oregon, or contact Randy Bush at randy@psg.com.

2.7 Hong Kong IX, Randy Conrad

The Hong Kong IX is built with an ethernet switch. There is so far no connection fee. Approx. 40 ISPs are connected, and they use a Cisco-4000 router as a "route server", which filters and aggregates routes for the parties connected there. There is a web pointer in Bill Manning's collection (mentioned above).

Several other IXes in the Asia/Pacific were briefly mentioned.

2.8 Stockholm D-GIX, Peter Lothberg

The Stockholm D-GIX is expanding from a simple co-locate facility to the carrier facilities of the two telecom providers licensed to sell international capacity out of Sweden (Telia and Tele2). An FDDI switch is being added to the existing switched ether and shared FDDI. The policy is fairly open with a simple "bring your box" policy, with housing and power for a Cisco-7010-sized box provided for free.

See http://www.sunet.se/dgix/ for more information.

2.9 Tokyo IX, Jun Murai

The Tokyo IX connects 16 commercial service providers, is called NSPIXP, and is being run by the WIDE project. Currently the IX is being moved to another physical location with more space. In the current facility maximally a T1 is allowed in, in the new facility there will be no such limitation. The IX is currently built with ethernet switches. There are some international service providers connected, but most are JP ISPs. There is a web page available, but so far it's only available in japanese (it is being translated). It's somewhere in http://www.wide.ad.jp/ (sorry, I've not been able to locate it myself...).

Guy Almes asked a general question whether the various IXes are only for ISPs or whether they permit connection of other servers (web servers etc.). It appeared that most IXes only permit ISP connections, some exceptions were mentioned: AMS-IX and CERN have MBONE routers on their IXes, NZ have a Web cache and a news server at the IX, the NAP in Pennsauken has a separate FDDI (in "ICM- land") for an MBONE router.

Lastly, more pointers to other IXes are available in Bill Manning's collection.

3. DNS use & abuse

In short, the quality of the DNS leaves a lot to be desired. (Stronger wording was used at the meeting...). The quality seems to be inversely proportional with the amount of clue or usage level of the DNS.

Randy Bush petitioned everyone to start auditing their data, he had done a scan of the .COM, .EDU +++ zones and found 236 zones where one of his name servers had been delegated to but which he had never heard of (much less configured in his name servers).

A point was made that two separate name servers for each zone may not be enough, and a painful experience was cited when a primary was down for a long time and the (single) secondary was down for a short. This is possibly fodder for a new I-D. It was mentioned that InterNIC is currently tightening their requirements for technical correctness before delegating, and that the RIPE NCC and APNIC are already checking the data before delegating (although RIPE NCC and APNIC only handle in-addr.arpa domains).

4. Draining 192/8 ("Draining the swamp")

This is an effort undertaken to get people to voluntarily return address space in 192/8 and either renumber into private address space or into more aggregateable address space. The InterNIC data was used to try to contact people, and of the 6000 requests sent 1500 failed and only 1800 responded. David Conrad from APNIC commented that this wasn't too surprising, and that they typically have approximately 85% failure rate due to stale data. An overview of the currently active routes in this address space can be found in http://www.isi.edu/div7/pier/whose-routes. Peter Lothberg commented that giving back IP addresses within 192/8 might be a problem since some registries appear to insist on having a customer relationship with the party giving back the addresses (the RIPE NCC was mentioned). Mike O'Dell commented that the process of keeping the registry data up-to-date is fundamentally broken, since we are using humans to keep track of what is essentially "computer data", and that some improvement to this process should be possible. A suggestion for other targets to perform similar activities in was mentioned, e.g. 198/8 and 204/8.

5. IP address registry issues

Randy Conrad from the APNIC made a presentation about the formal organization of the IP address registries. The "historic" model is a hierarchy US DoD - FNC - IANA - InterNIC. RFC 1466 introduced RIPE NCC and APNIC as clients of the InterNIC. This model is as it's name indicates "historical", and will probably not continue. The new so-called "politically correct" model is a hierarchy ISOC - IAB - IANA with InterNIC, RIPE NCC and APNIC as all answering to IANA, and still with no end-users directly as clients of the regional registries. This is the likely future. A more "pragmatic" model would change the top of the hierarchy in the PC model to have the IANA answer to the ISPs. This binding currently does not exist. This model is slightly "unstable", in that it lacks end-user representation. A couple of comments: o IPv4 address space is becoming more scarce (and more valuable). However, it's not as scarce as "route slots"! o Registries can't modify their policies by ISP whims o The end of unallocated "free" address space doesn't necessarily mean the end of the Internet or that it will stop growing. o Fiscal issues: all registries except the InterNIC are self-funding There is a need to nurture the IANA to work independetly of political distrubances.

6. Routing Arbiter route flap report

Craig Labovitz made a presentation of the work the RA is doing to present Internet routing flap reports. Collection of raw data is presently done on 3 of the "priority NAPs" and 1 other NAP. What has been made available so far can be seen on http://www.ra.net/statistics/ and other interfaces to the data will be forthcoming soon. The RA team is soliciting suggestions for alternate reports and ways to present the data. Some observations: o The Internet is unstable and is getting worse! o There is a minority of ASes who are responsible for the majority of route flaps o The instabilities are increasing despite the deployment of BGP dampening code o The general level of "routing experience" in the ISP community is decreasing (and thus the ability to tackle these problems) o The route flaps are (not unexpectedly) worst during prime time EST. o In general, both filtering of routing updates and dampening are good things. o There are a number of /32 prefixes, 1597 addresses and even default routes being announced. Should there be a bogon report per source AS? Should this be extended to check consistency of routing? o The IRR can be useful as a source of filtering data. New reports are still to come. Suggestions are welcome, please contact labovit@merit.edu.

7. Registry and directory services

Jerry Scarf from Vixie Enterprises held a presentation about the project sponsored by the CIX to produce a registry tool suite. This is seen as needed as more registries become established. The focus is both on tools and documentation. Of the tools envisioned are: o The RIPE database software o selecting a ticketing system, including system for inter-registry or inter-NOC transfer of responsibility o various other automation tools Questions were raised regarding the scalability of this model -- would it be appropriate to have thousands of registries? Mike O'Dell commented that more automation should be applied, and that the current model needs more (incremental) improvement. Turning this problem into an MPP problem isn't necessarily a good idea.

8. Network statistics and measurements + architecture for information provisioning.

This was partly a summary of a NSF workshop held approx. 1 week before the IEPG meeting. NN presented the summary. The availability of statistical data in the post-NSFnet network has radically decreased. Combined with the rapid growth of the network and the increasing expectations of the users, this may quickly turn into an unstable sitation. Most of the commercial service providers seem to have a (too) short-term focus on their plans. There was foreseen a clear need for metrics for Quality of Service. Among the issues brought up were: o trace-driven experiments o specs for router vendors o aggregate flows o specs to give to ISPs o routing stability A basic problem is that a good crystal ball is needed to predict the next killer application. Statistics are of course useful, but they are not able to predict drastic changes. Some pro-active steps can be taken: o More widespread deployment (and use, when appropriate) of IP multicast o Improve protocol efficiency (where HTTP was pointed out as a particularly bad example) On the last front the NSF is sponsoring a project on deployment of HTTP cache servers, done as an experimental prototype. They are currently using Harvest, more information is available from the web at http://www.nlanr.net/Cache/Statistics. Others were encouraged to deploy HTTP caches and to interconnect them with the other caches. Optimum placement of caches was pointed to as an outstanding issue.

9. Internet traffic profile reports

A pair of short presentations were made regarding efforts to closer inspect the traffic profiles. Dorian Kim from CICnet showed some graphs displaying strong traffic growth. He pointed out that over the last 270 day period the average bytes per packet has increased from approx. 200 to approx. 270 bytes, and the average is continuing to increase. Some of the reason can probably be explained with wider deployment of path MTU discovery, another explanation could be the ever increasing percentage of HTTP traffic. Olivier Martin from CERN made a short presentation on the traffic pattern measurements they are doing at CERN. They use a special version of tcpdump which logs 1 of every 20 packets. The purpose is to check the distribution of the load between the users of their shared connection to MCI.

10. Real-time performance analysis

Steve Corbato made a presentation of the tools created and measurements done to get a grip on real-time network performance at the University of Washington. The slides from his presentation are available from http://weber.u.washington.e du/~corbato/iepgtalk/. Earlier data from Bellcore was collected in 1989 / 1992, and the effects of the changes seen since then (TCP Reno, HTTP, DS-3 networks and increase in BW times delay product) would be interesting to investigate.

The method used was to do frequent SNMP polls (1-2 Hz) in combination with special cisco software which updates its SNMP counters more frequently than the standard version, and using the value of sysUpTime.0 as the reference clock.

Plots showing the peak/average ratio (approx 1.9 +/- 15% in this measurement), rate distribution and rate specturm were shown, as well as a couple of other plots characterizing the data set and measurements.

The interesting region of the load from a real-time perspective is the 99 - 99.7 percentile.

This technique is primarily a "quick and dirty" technique useful for ISP/campus nets in looking at the real-time performance of their networks.

11. Closing

The meeting was closed with a short discussion over the usefullness of these meetings and the frequency they should be held with.

After some discussion it was agreed that there should be an IEPG meeting in conjunction with every IETF meeting.