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27th September - AfriNIC Plenary I

i) AfriNIC Corporate Update – Adiel A. Akplogan

Adiel talked about the Board's 2008-2010 strategic plan for AfriNIC and that members will be consulted for input and participation.

He showed the growth in the allocation of internet resources in Africa, discussed the exhaustion of the IPv4 central pool and the need to transition to IPv6.

He discussed the importance of resource certification particularly for securing resources especially in the post-exhaust IPv4 environment where there will be greater trading of ipv4 resources.

He said there is a need to improve the quality of AfriNIC's service to its members and that the organisation will be hiring more technical staff next year to improve its operations. He also mentioned that AfriNIC will be moving to new office space to handle staffing growth.

To view the presentation, click here.

ii) Board Activity Update – Sunday Folayan

The following activities have occurred since the last board meeting in Abuja:
- Passing a resolution for staff to draw increased public awareness toIPv6 issues.
- Working on the constitution which is now available for public comment.
- Working on an MOU with AfrISPA.
- Resolved to participate in IGF, Rio.
- Have discussed parallel markets for IPs and current exhaustion of the IPv4 pool.
- Policies but are yet to take a position.
- Aim to set the foundation for a strategic plan for IPV6, which they initiated at a recent board retreat.
- See presentation for further details.

iii) Joint NRO Statistics – Ernest Byaruhanga

Ernest Byaruhanga presented the NRO joint statistics for AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC. He showed the distribution of the IPv4 address space, a yearly and cumulative total of ASN, IPv4 and IPv6 allocations/assignments made by RIRs to LIRs, and IPv6 allocations made by IANA to the RIRs. He provided links to data sources.

To view the presentation, click here.

Discussions:

William Stucke enquired who allocated the IPv4 to AfriNIC region in 2001.

Ray Plzak clarified that the other RIRs allocated this.

A speaker from the floor asked if the one /8 which has been allocated is enough. He commented that there are several enterprises that use IPv4 addresses, and noted that most of them obtain these addresses from Europe and other regions, not from AfriNIC. He asked AfriNIC what plan they have for these allocations to come from AfriNIC.

Ernest - responded to the first question asked, stating that the /8 was received in January 2007 and, looking at the current trend, this should be adequate. He added that AfriNIC hope to obtain an additional /8 in 2008. Ernest commented that the other question should perhaps be answered by the board.

An AfriNIC Board member stated that a number of satellite carriers do have AfriNIC allocations.

Adiel - noted that several organisations are still using NATs and other techniques as opposed to strictly using IPv4 obtained from AfriNIC. He further noted that this is also why AfriNIC are placing emphasis on training as awareness is important to let people know that they can obtain IP addresses from AfriNIC. He added that AfriNIC are happy to hear additional ideas on this and that they are pushing so that the operator can receive what they need today.

Leo Vegoda, IANA - wished to clarify that there are two /8s, 41 and 196, marked to be reserved for AFriNIC in the IANA IPv4 registry.

A speaker from the floor wished to do a quick check to clarify an issue, he wished to place a perspective that the current allocation depicts a depletion date of 2014. He expressed his concerns for more work needing to be done with regards to projections commenting that it would be necessary to determine the current activities in the African region and to identify the regional plans. He expressed his belief that these plans may effect current projections and that it would be good to have this in place, noting that he was unsure if regional plans would affect AfriNIC's plans for the future.

Ernest clarified that the use of NAT is discouraged in AfriNIC documents and that whenever AfriNIC staff receive requests of this nature, they discourage it.

Adiel - noted that the document that is used to reach these projections adds factors that allow AfriNIC to make these projections. He noted that if AfriNIC members have a need to request the resources they will get them. He further added that no matter what AfriNIC's projection is, the key point is how we are going to manage the IANA pool, noting these issues are things AfriNIC would like to focus on.

Brian Longwe, Kenya - requested to ask AfriNIC 7 participants about two major issues. The first issue, he noted, had already been addressed, which is the issue of increasing awareness for new LIRs. He added that although these issues are being worked on there is a need to continue work in this area. He then commented on the other issues that he felt was a bigger issue, being that at an operational level, many African ISPs still use NAT. He expressed his concern that this is holding Africa back when addressing the issue of obtaining number resources and using them the way they should be used.

A speaker from the floor clarified that it is one thing to tell people what to do, but another thing to have people change their behaviour. He has asked members of the room if they have any responses to this question.

Rob Hansen, - wished to clarify the status of 192 196?

Ernest – clarified the status

A speaker from the floor wished to draw on Bryan Longwe’s comments, about the layer nine level, he expressed that this is a level 9 issue and that technical people know what needs to be done, however the economic side does not add up with the policy side. He expressed his concerns that he feels this is a critical component and that the African community need to create awareness of the business sense to people in order to help bring about a change.

Jordi Palet - commented on the usage of NAT in other regions, which, he noted, is not perhaps the same as in Africa, it's really difficult at this stage to convince people to change as it means the cost of renumbering networks and other issues so there is sometimes some other reasons. He commented that it will be much better to, instead of asking people to renumbering their network, to keep doing what they are doing, but for new customers use IPv6.

Allen - commented that if you as a customer find yourself behind an NAT you should tell your provider and complain and let them know that you do not want this. He expressed that perhaps if the customers complain NAT use could be stopped.

Paul Wilson - commented that in the APNIC regions, the NAT is heavily used, for example in India, and that APNIC have not been able to address this as downstream ISPs cannot obtain this and they are not big enough to come to APNIC for resources. So there are at times 2 layers of NATS. Paul clarified that he made this point at the last APNIC meeting that this behaviour has made India have a very low deployment of addresses in India, this did ring alarm bells and made them (Indian ISPs) think that perhaps there is something they need to do

A speaker from the floor commented that IPs usage and costs impact on the use of NATS as companies cannot afford the costs, also there is a lack of communication between AfriNIC and the end users and this is a problem.

A speaker from the floor clarified that when AfriNIC gets to your country with their outreach they will let your community know that they can get their addresses from AfriNIC.

Philip Smith - further commented on Paul Wilson’s comments about NAT use in India, stating that there is only a fraction of a /8 allocated to a country with a population of over a billion people. He noted that people in this region still have no idea that they can get their addresses directly from AfriNIC. He stressed the need that we all help spread this word and not just expect the registries to do so.

Mark Elkins - stated that he needs NAT, as long as he has NAT he can control over what comes in and goes out of his network

Adiel - further commented on the issue that it has come down to awareness and how the operator hears the issue and takes this message back to their communities. As Philip said, this is an issue that we must all be responsible for creating awareness of. He expressed that we need to all work together on spreading this word. He further added that the issue of NAT in contrary is to educate people from layer one to layer nine. AfriNIC cannot come up with a list of ISPs using NAT, but we can if we know that there is an issue in a particular country extend outreach and get the word into that community.

David Conrad, ICANN - getting addresses from a registry may be trivial compared to getting space from an ISP. You need to have an ISP route the addresses. If you obtain the address space you need to find an ISP that will route it. Perhaps AfriNIC could look into these issues, He further commented that in about five years the techniques that are used in Africa presently may be in high demand as there will be no more IPv4 and everyone will need to know how to use NATs.

iv) NRO-NC/ASO-AC Update – Alan P. Barrett

Allan Barrett described the NRO and the role and duties of the NRO-NC within the NRO. He described the ASO-AC and said that the NRO-NC fulfils the role of the ASO-AC according to the MOU between ICANN and the NRO.

He discussed membership representation on the NRO-NC, AfriNIC's representatives and talked about the group's mailing list, website and other means of communication.

He explained the tasks of the ASO-AC and its role in ICANN appointments and governance issues. He noted two new global policy proposals, past meetings, outreach workshops and the upcoming meeting in Los Angeles in November.

To view the presentation, click here.

v) RIR Updates:

- APNIC, Paul Wilson

Paul Wilson gave an update on the member survey conducted at APNIC and presented an analysis of the survey. He highlighted the confidentiality of the respondents on the survey. He also listed the priority areas namely: Technical Research and Development, Streamline process, increase accessibility of meetings and policy process, represent the needs of ISPs, Expanding training activities, improving APNIC website, Support ISP Education in AP Region, Resource certification and expand communication and outreach.
He closed the presentation by inviting all participants to share their views on their understanding of the term ‘Critical Internet Resource’.

To view the presentation, click here.

- ARIN, Ray Plzak

Ray introduced the ARIN delegation that was present at AfriNIC 7.
A copy of the ARIN Report, September 2007 was distributed to the participants.

Ray explained that the ARIN board of trustees issued a resolution in May 2007, advising the Internet community that migration to a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, will be necessary to allow continued growth of the Internet.

Ray noted that at the upcoming ARIN meeting in New Mexico, the ARIN Board of Trustees will be attending Board of trustees retreat.

Ray explained the outreach activities that have been conducted by ARIN and highlighted upcoming outreach activities that ARIN will be participating in.

Ray noted that ARIN will be releasing two new comic books next months which focus on IPv4 depletion and IPv6 uptake.

Ray noted that the ARIN board reaffirmed that the policy development process can reflect what the community thinks about legacy address space. He further noted that this is prevalent as most of the legacy address space resides in the ARIN region. One discussion was if these address holders should enter a contract with ARIN, become more a part of the community and work more within the PDP.

He expressed some views of members of the ARIN community of recognising that there will become a point when there will not be any IPv4 address space left in the IANA pool, although there will of course still be IPv4 address space, therefore discussion has been focusing on what needs to be done internally to enable ongoing handling of IPv4 addresses. He noted that some policy proposals that will be discussed at the upcoming ARIN meeting next month, will deal with this issue.

Ray then updated the consultation and suggestion process at ARIN, noting that there were a few odd ones, however there were some very good responses, and that this procedure enabled separating operational matters from the policy development process.

Ray noted that further information can be found on the ARIN website.

To view the hand-out, click here.

- LACNIC, Ricardo Patara

Ricardo Patara mentioned that the result for the high number of members for IPv6 is due to the effective campaign for IPv6 awareness. He highlighted the membership evolution at LACNIC, mentioning that that the increasing number is due to the fact that LACNIC has formalised the relationship with the Brazilian NIR. He mentioned that the LACNIC has undergone major organisational change: namely the acquisition of an office space. He also spoke about the strategic planning of LACNIC and presented the vision and mission statement. He gave an update of the LACNIC X meeting. He presented the collaboration between LACNIC and the Information Society in LAC and the E-LAC.

He finished by inviting the members to the next LACNIC meeting in Brazil.

To view the presentation, click here.

- RIPE NCC, Axel Pawlik

Axel Pawlik opened the presentation by emphasising the need develop ‘Disaster Preparedness’ by the following means: emergency plan, ensure full business continuation plan, member benefit and corporation among RIR. He gave an update of the major changes at RIPE NCC, at the team level as well as the focus areas. He presented the Vision and Strategy of RIPE NCC and presented the certification in the RIPE region. He spoke about members and outreach (Surpassing 5000 members with the biggest growth in Russia). He also spoke about government and ‘enhanced corporation’ in the region. He gave an update of the RIPE 54 meeting and presented the upcoming meetings.

To view the presentation, click here.

vi) ICANN Report – Anne Rachel Inne

Anne Rachel Inne opened the session by presenting the general principles of operation of ICANN. She also gave an update on the upcoming events. She listed the main topics that will be discussed at the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, October 2007. She also presented the challenges for the Africa Region. One of the issues highlighted was the language barrier and the lack of resources to have the adequate expertise for the translations. She also mentioned that for the codification of languages do not include any African language and invited the players in Africa to address this issue. She also invited contribution for drafting the NRO terms of reference.

She highlighted the importance for the African continent to voice out its requirements at the ICANN meetings and invited strong participation from this region.

Discussion:
A speaker from the floor asked Anne Rachel to clarify her comment regarding IDNs in English.

Anne Rachel replied that IDNs are actually right now leaving us a lot of problem in regards to policies being put in place. She further expressed that in this region the Housa language is used and that she is not comfortable in self representing this language group as a whole.

The speaker from the floor thanked her for her English clarification, he then added that this community does need to know and that more needs to be done.
Anne Rachel agreed.

A speaker from the floor - asked about the similar use of dot.cat for a linguistic group.

Anne Rachel responded that dot.cat agreed and supported the idea that catalonean was a linguistic community and that they wished to preserve this language and that using dot.cat enabled them to be a part of it.

To view the presentation, click here.

vii) IANA Report – Leo Vegoda

Leo Vegoda presented the new IANA website. He gave an update on the recent Number allocations: to RIR and those returned to IANA. He also gave an update on the DNS work and the new IPv4 Registry Format DNS Work
– In-addr.arpa
– DNS

To view the presentation, click here.

viii) AfNOG Report - Sekyen Niyang

Sunday noted that he thought it more appropriate for Sekyen Niyang to do this presentation. (from NGNOG)

Sekyen provided an overview of AfNOG, its objectives and a brief history of its achievements. She noted that many countries were already planning on holding similar meetings.

She also provided an overview of meeting participants’ background, noting that NgNOG is primarily organised by education and research institutions, which has brought about an increase of educational and research institutions in AfNOG.

She commented on some of the challenges confronting AfNOG, noting that language was a barrier as it presently was only presented in French and English, and that AfNOG hope to be able to present in local languages in the future.

She provided an overview of AfNOG achievements, noting that AfNOG had trained over 800 internet engineers and that former students are now instructors. She also noted that Nigeria is adding two new tracks in November 2007.

She invited participants to attend AfNOG9-9/AfrNIC 8 in May 2008, which will be held in Rabat.

To view the presentation, click here .

ix) AfTLD Report – Michuki Mwangi

Michuki Mwangi gave an overview of the roles and highlighted the challenges faced by Cctld. He emphasised the direct relationship between internet penetration and domain name registration. He gave an update on the activities of the AfTLD activities. He highlighted participation at local and international level. He mentioned collaboration with AfriNIC though the MOU that has been signed, participation in the AfriNIC events, ICANN, IGF. He mentioned that this is important for the Representation of the African continent. He highlighted the focus areas for AfTLD. He mentioned that one of the important challenges will be fund raising activities.

To view the presentation, click here.

x) 32 bit ASN numbers - Phil Smith

Based on the fact the 16 bit ASN numbers will be exhausted soon, the internet community has started working to extend the ASN pool to 32 bits. A description of all the specifications can be found in the RFC 4893.
These 32 bit ASN numbers are available on request since January 2007. The representation of these numbers is still on discussion.
For the author what is important here is to note that the 32 bit is compatible with the 16 but ASN numbers.
There is no need to throw out old routers or replace old 16 bits ASN numbers with the new 32 bits ASN. In term of functionality only local routers will need to support the 16 bits ASN, remote routers will support the 32 bits ASN. What has changed is the new BGP attributes AS4_PATH and AS4_AGGREGATOR. Philip Smith said also that some implementations already exist. These implementations are Quagga, OpenBGPd, JunOSE and RedBACK. Cisco also supports this since IOS-RX 3.4 release.

Discussion:
A speaker from the floor asked if he needs to get a new router.

Philip further explained that if you have an existing 16-bit number you do not need to do anything, but if you are new and you are going to use a 32-bit ASN then, yes, you will.

A speaker from the floor asked Philip to please spread this information so that people in Africa do not throw out their routers.

Philip stated that nobody in this room will need to do anything, but in 2010 they will need to.

To view the presentation, click here.

xi) Reclaiming the legacy 14.0.0.0/8 addresses - Leo Vegoda

14.0.0.0/8 Class A addresses are commonly used in the international system of PDN (Public Data Networks). The main task in this reclaiming process is mapping this class A address to the X 121 addresses used in the X25 networks. In most cases one or two of these addresses are really assigned and only few of them are used in PDN networks.

Leo explained that there were 984 addresses and that there were 29 contacts.

He added that it took him personally about 100 hours of work for research and liaison for under 1000 addresses. He noted that the workload varied for the networks, ranging from 5 minutes to a few hours spread over a few days. He further noted that one organisation re-numbered their networks in order to tidy it up and hand them back.

Leo summarised the workload as being 3 1/2 hours per registration. He added that this is a lot of work for low value addresses as it is difficult, however this does not mean that address space is not worth reclaiming.

To view the presentation, click here.

xii) Internet Routing Registry for Africa – Mark Elkins

Mark explained that currently there is not a Routing registry for African and that presently double work is needed as double registering is required without an African Routing Registry,

He explained that a routing registry was a place to define and store ones’ given resources, peering and transit relationships.

He noted that two registry systems do not currently provide, and identified those as AfriNIC and LACNIC.

He highlighted some issues and advantages of using AfriNIC for this, highlighting that there would be the downside of using more AfriNIC bandwidth.

Mark noted the advantages that it should not matter where your registry is held, and that it allows others to see what networks/prefixes you can carry. He also noted that it would be of huge importance to keep the information up to date.

To view the presentation, click here .

Discussion:
A speaker from the floor asked if Mark imagined that when two database is provided, that getting the LIRs address space current and updated will be difficult.

Mark responded by saying that a lot of people are already keeping their information update. He noted that if you are peering at home within Africa it may not be the case.

A speaker from the floor commented that the structure of the database is difficult for us to update as you need to extract the text and I think that perhaps you could make a friendly user interface that is easier for people to use.

Mark noted that this is not necessary as at present you have web and mail.

Frank noted that there will be a presentation later on MyAfriNIC which will further clarify this.

To view the presentation, click here.

xiii) Update from Anti-Spam WG – Jean Robert Hountomey

Jean Robert Hountomey presented the outcome of the BoF which was held in Abuja during AfriNIC-6 (21 participants) and the one at AfriNIC-7 on the eve.

He gave a report of the online discussions so far on the anti-spam mailing list. He also mentioned some areas of work which is required.

To view the presentation, click here .

xiv) Discussion on Open Policy Proposals – Hisham R. Rojoa

The two global IPv4 exhaustion proposals were delivered today.

1) Global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space, click here.

2) JPNIC proposal, click here.

There was consensus that something needs to be done.

There was consensus that there should be equal allocation amongst the RIRs.

Both policies were then submitted for a show of hands to the community to see if there was consensus on the proposals.

For the first policy when called for a show of hands there were 9 hands in favour.

There was a call for a show of hands for the JPNIC proposal and there were 5 hands in favour.

When asked who is against both proposals there was 1 response.

It was determined that the first proposal reached consensus, but would be referred to the mailing list to determine consensus on the value of N.
In relation to the first proposal there was a call for a show of hands for the end count.
N = 1- 6 hands
N = 2 - 6 hands
N = 3 - 0 hands
N = 4 - 0 hands
N = 5 - 0 hands
This policy is now going to the mailing list for further discussion to determine N = ?

To view the presentation, click here.

xv) MyAfriNIC Presentation – Frank Nnebe

He presented the new portal and mentioned that there were main objectives were: Simple, graphical, user-friendly interface; Member functionality in one place; Provide enhanced service and support Ensure seamless integration with WHOIS. He gave an update of the present portal and highlighted the different problems and difficulties that members may encounter. He demonstrated how MyAfriNIC is a solution to the various issues. He presented the different functionalities which includes among others: member., account management, organisation information, contact information management, user administration, notifications, billing , on line payment, resource management
He concluded by mentioning that My AfriNIC is a user-friendly Web-based interface that enables AfriNIC members to manage their account, information and resources with enhanced service and support.

To view the presentation, click here.

One speaker from the floor asked to clarify how the system was more user friendly. Unfortunately, due to some connectivity issue, the demo had to be postponed to the following day.