May 17 WG Meeting, 07/21/2000 Proposed Agenda: 1. Scope and goal of discussion 2. Description of current procedures for obtaining address space, assignment windows, approvals 3. New LIR growth 4. Assignment window 5. Response time and emergency measures 6. Usage Criteria 7. Category priorities 8. accessibility and communication 9. tools List of attendees Nurani Joao Anne Wilfred Stephen Barbara Daniel Sabine Gert 1. Scope and goals of discussion Propose changes to policies and procedures for address assignments to ultimately be submitted to LIR WG, with the clarification of best practices and tangible steps to achieving those goals. This group will not determine how RIPE NCC internally achieves those goals. 2. Current status of procedures a. Process includes sanity checks that may be delegated to LIRs b. Previously no automatic review of Assignment window, now auto reminders in place, made difficult by no flagging of good/bad tickets, no record of why assignment window was denied i.e.. The quality of the LIR requests will be flagged so a more informed decision of the AW status can be made. c. Wait queue due mostly to under staffing combined with significant increase in new LIR growth. d. Improving ripe-141 instructions (ripe-185) may cut down on common time-consuming errors. Although the form provides the hostmasters with enough detail to approve/decline a request it is very sparse on helpful comments for the engineer/customer filling in the details. 3. New LIRs a. Nurani provided information on how many new LIRs are being added, current rate is ~80/month b. Who is becoming an LIR? Should we actively discourage LIR's some how? Raise the setup fee? See 3d. c. LIRs are coming in a at a much faster rate than previously, ask RIPE to review resources consumed in supporting LIRs and whether it would be appropriate to create a specialized group for dealing with LIR applications, education, etc. d. Also, review new LIR fees to see if they cover resources consumed by the application and education process, a new LIR takes up more time and resources than does a large well established registry with experienced Hostmaster. But this creates a problem when the same country with more than one registry uses the same engineers how do you justify charging them more? and how do you track the experienced engineers, we could end up creating a market for exirienced RIPE hostmasters. 4. Assignment window a. Safety net would provide a certain measure of business performance, problem is that safety nets can be abused if not implemented properly. b. Flexible assignment window offers more security from abuse and a traceable audit. c. This becomes a problem of registration accuracy and address conservation, random audits difficult to perform. d. Consensus is that some process of flexible assignment windows will be appropriate to implement but it will have an upper limit. e. Run the db audit at the time of the assignment window increase, with all errors fixed for qualification. This would take the place of audits at each assignment approval request. This could also be part of the LIR's responsibility to provide a valid clean audit, rather than the hostmaster running it. It is also a measure of whether they are really competent and deserve a larger AW. 5. Category priorities: should different categories of request have different priorities in the queue? i.e. contact requests are not the same as IP requests but how do you decide how important each type is? a. once we reach our goal of having a reasonable wait queue, this issue becomes moot. b. if we reach a point where queue exceeds maximum point, then prioritization becomes useful. c. should be looked at in conjunction with response time measures. 6. Accessibility a. Phone help desk runs into problems of accessibility for language and cost factors b. Possible to set up email help desk as a test mode, possibly a three month trial c. Translation of ripe-142 and ripe-185 and other supporting address space documents to other languages to improve communication and education for LIRs. 7. Response time a. Flexible assignment windows when acceptable limit is exceeded. b. When a ticket is in the queue for longer than the target RTT, then certain simplification efforts would kick in. These could be with multiple levels of intervention, and could be invisible to the LIR as a separate process. c. Once a ticket hits the maximum RTT, a special response would occur, which would be marked as unique and auditable and the special response should be capped at a certain level (e.g. /22, or number of approvals per LIR, or other set criteria) d. RTT is defined as getting meaningful response from hostmaster (the initial human response) to ticket request, and should apply for each iteration of reply, not for overall ticket assignment e. The limiting criteria can be described as: Response times. 1-2 days - Normal and acceptable 3-4 days - Request simplification processes put in place. Or AW +1 applied on temp basis below /22 5+ days - Auto approval with auditable response on all requests in queue over 4 days up to /22 8. Usage Criteria /20 criteria a. When an LIR gets a /20 as an initial allocation, they may run into a utilization issue at the 80% mark (12.8 used, 3.2 available) with one customer able to eat this space up an LIR could end up with no IP's to assign till more allocated. Again this is only with a high wait queue once the queue is under control this also becomes moot. b. Proposal is that if the growth is happening in a very short amount of time, the utilization level could be set at an amount smaller than 80%, offering a buffer for growth. So if an LIR can show fast take up at less than 80% the rest of the /19 will be allocated. 9. Tools a. db audit tool for LIRs to run before submitting requests for allocations thus removing the need for Hostmasters to run exhaustive audits when the problems are caused by the LIR. In other words get your house in order before even coming back to RIPE NCC for more space. b. Improved user interface to forms such as the 141 syntax checker. 10. Feedback useful for evaluating the changes proposed are the collection of statistics regarding IP assignments, LIR growth, and other elements impacting this process. This should be done on a continuous basis with a web page resource for the community. 11. We will distribute minutes to the TF, then distribute them to the LIR WG and we will prepare a presentation for the September RIPE NCC meeting. Your Fellow RIPE Members May17TF