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RIPE 84 in Berlin

June 09, 2022 — Nico Cartron

A quick article on my thoughts about RIPE 84.


RIPE Meeting

What is it?

According to the RIPE's website, a RIPE meeting "brings together Internet service providers, network operators and other interested parties from around the world to:

  • discuss RIPE policies/procedures,
  • participate in the various working groups,
  • share experiences,
  • develop their network of peers in the Internet community.

What's the point?

TL;DR: it's an event where you can learn a lot about your topics of interest (mainly related to network in general), but also give direct feedback, and get involved.

To give an example: I am heavily involved in DNS, both with my job, and also personally, so attending a RIPE meeting is a very good and efficient way to:

  • listen to very interesting topics about DNS: new usages, tests, issues, ...
  • meet the DNS community: most open source and commercial vendors attend, as well as researchers, telcos etc - so again a very good way to gather a lot of information in a short amount of time :)

My RIPE meetings

There are usually 2 RIPE meetings per year, around April/May and October/November (although if you check the previous RIPE meetings page, you'll notice that initially there were a lot more meetings per year: 3 per year between 1991 and 2004, and even more between 1989 and 1991, but that was because those were the very first RIPE meetings, with plenty of things to put in place).

I haven't made a count before this article, but did it quickly: RIPE 84 was my 8th RIPE meeting, as I attended:

  • RIPE 62 (Amsterdam, May 2011)
  • RIPE 65 (Amsterdam, September 2012)
  • RIPE 69 (London, November 2014)
  • RIPE 71 (Bucharest, November 2015)
  • RIPE 72 (Copenhagen, May 2016)
  • RIPE 76 (Marseille, May 2018)
  • RIPE 80 (Virtual, May 2020)

RIPE 84

I won't give details on all the sessions, but will rather sum up the talks of interest for me.

The location

The conference was held at the Intercontinental, near Berlin Zoo.
As usual, a convenient place, easy to reach from a train station/airport.

RIPE meeting Logistics

As always, the meeting's logistics is extremely well done: upon arriving, you pick you your badge (as well as T-Shirt, unless like me you forget and end up doing it 2 days later, with a lot less choice in terms of size!) and you head to the main lobby to grab a coffee.

Open-source WG

  • "5 years of FRRouting" by Donatas Abraitis (presentation here) gave an interesting view about how an Open-source project is maintained, e.g. in terms of versions/stages, CI/CD, testing environment, but also little-known features.
    The part about "How to start contributing?" was also nice, and reminded me of my post about "Contributing to Open Source without being a developer".
  • "Peering Manager" (presentation here) by my colleague Guillaume Mazoyer was also great not only because this is a very nice software, but also because Guillaume introduced it at RIPE 76 in Marseille in 2018 - PDF is here and video is here, so it was fun to see how far it went in 4 years.

DNS Working Group

I'll be a bit more verbous about that session, since DNS is kinda special to me.
Of course, I wore my "It's always DNS" t-shirt during that day.

  • "DNS over QUIC" (DoQ, RFC 9250) (presentation here), by Sara Dickinson.
    An update with a lot of details, and essentially an answer to:
    • Why did we standardize ANOTHER protocol for encrypted DNS?
      • QUIC interesting for encrypted DNS: low latency, UDP but with QUIC benefits (source address validation, ...)
    • How is DoQ different to DoT/DoH?
      • DoQ can provide encryption not only between Stub resolver and Recursive resolver, but also between Recursive and Authoritative servers, as well as for zone transfers (XFR), via RFC 9103.
    • Where are we with implementation and deployment of DoQ?
      • Most implementations done for DNS libraries or DNS utilities (dnslookup, Flamethrower) - only CoreDNS has support for DoQ, thanks to the use of AdGuard.
      • No major Recursive/Authoritative DNS server has implemented DoQ yet.
  • "Catalog Zones" (presentation here), by Petr Špaček.
    • Reminder: Catalog zones is a list of DNS zones, in form of a DNS zone, and is zone-transferable - goal is to provide a standardised way of telling Secondary DNS servers which DNS zones they should transfer, from whom - essentially removing the need for scripting (Ansible, Chef, ...) or even manual configurations!
    • Version 2 of Catalog Zones is now interoperable between Bind, Knot and NSD - PowerDNS maybe in the future?
    • Specifications are here and you can chat on the DNS-OARC Mattermost channel.
  • "DNS4EU Research" (presentation here) by João Damas, APNIC.
    • very well done presentation, talking about the EU initiative to bring a public DNS resolver in Europe
      • João and the APNIC team had a look at exactly how much end users were using Google/Cloudflare/Quad9 public DNS resolvers, vs. their ISP DNS servers (see details in the presentation, or this tweet and this one
      • The conclusion was interesting: "before it becomes a big problem perhaps something can be done?" - but also: "the Internet is at its finest when it self regulates with the network". and its users’ interests at the heart of the matter"
  • "KINDNS" (presentation here) by Adiel. A. Akplogan, ICANN.
    • An ICANN initiative to promote DNS Ops best practices
    • Applies to Authoritative and Recursive DNS, as well as software
    • For instance:
      • MUST be DNSSEC signed and follow key management best practices
      • Transfer between authoritative servers MUST be limited

30 years anniversary of the DNS Working Group!

The DNS WG was created in June 1992, so we even had a cake to celebrate!


(Picture courtesy of .IE)

Networking & Social

Networking

Of course, a RIPE meeting is not only about attending talks - cause let's face it, you could perfectly do so remotely.
No, one of, if not the biggest advantage of attending in person is socialising and networking with people.

I think this tweet sums up pretty well how a RIPE meeting helps:

When you attend industry conferences (RIPE, NANOG, UKNOF, ...), you're building a network of relationship, folks in your industry, should they be customers, prospects, partners, competitors, students, ...

The goal is really to exchange, find new ideas, confront your opinions, etc.

DNS Dinner

On Wednesday evening, we had a dinner with pretty much all the open-source DNS folks: ISC, NLnet Labs, CZ.NIC - only my ex-fellow colleagues from PowerDNS couldn't make it - which is too bad, since they had their company's event (Open-Xchange) in Berlin just the week before.

We went to a German place, chosen by Jerry from DNS-OARC - the place was nice and it was basically just us (we were around 30 people after all!), and it was good to catch up with plenty of folks from the DNS industry.

Pasteis de Nata Interest Group (PIG-WG)

Introduced by Denesh some time ago, this WG is part of the unofficial working groups/BoF, such as the OpCheese or the Whisky BoF.

The goal is to "spread the word" about Pasteis de Nata, so that people who do not know them can get a chance to taste them, and those who do can try local flavors :-)

RIPE Dinner

On Thursday evening, there was the usual RIPE dinner - for those not familiar, the gathering happens in a nice location and (usually) nice food and drinks - I have vivid memories of gorgeous RIPE dinners in Copenhagen, Marseille, Bucharest and Marseille!

This RIPE meeting was no exception: we went to "Arminius-Markthalle", which consists of plenty of different food booths where you order, and you can eat either standing while talking, or seat on a banch.
This reminded me of "La Felicita" in Paris (near Station F), except in Berlin there's a large selection of countries,whereas La Felicita is only Italian food.

Wrap Up

Once again a very nice and successful RIPE meeting, it's good to be back in-person!

Look forward to meeting more people at the next one!


Tags: Misc, DNS


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