Progress Report September - November, 1993 Tony Bates Daniel Karrenberg 1. Management Summary The PRIDE project has started as planned. Currently one of the two engineer positions has been filled. The second engineer is expected to join the project in January 1994. We expect to finish the project within 12 months as planned by assigning additional resources to it later on. The project has been presented at the September RIPE meeting as planned. The first beta PRIDE Tools release has been made and is being tested by a number of beta testers. The defin- ite release is planned for week 50. Progress report will from now on be monthly and use the out- line: Management Summary Pride Activities Related Activities Progress against Milestones Planning Appendices The reports will be distributed to the mailing list. 2. PRIDE Activities 2.1. The Team The project started on September 1st as planned. Currently only one of the two engineer positions is filled by Tony Bates. Daniel Karrenberg spends one third of his time on PRIDE as planned. It is planned that Marten Terps- tra will join the PRIDE team as the second engineer in Janu- ary, at the time his replacement on the NCC team will be December 2, 1993 - 2 - available. The decision to delay getting the project team to full strength is due to our choice for quality -as opposed to quickly available- personnel. We plan to make good this delay by having more people work on PRIDE in later stages of the project. In this context we would like to stress that the PRIDE team works closely with the NCC team in order to achieve the goals of the project. During the project some members of the NCC team may work on specific tasks for PRIDE while members of the PRIDE team will work on specific NCC tasks in return. This way we can get the job done by the most appropriate person and achieve additional synergy. NCC management will take great care to see that this does not lead to one activity cross-subsidising the other. 2.2. Project presented at September RIPE meeting The PRIDE project was presented to the RIPE meeting in Amsterdam on Wednesday, 14th September. The presentation gave a basic overview on the PRIDE proposal plus an outline of the organisational arrangements of the project. The slides of the presentation can be found on: ftp.ripe.net:ripe/presentations/ripe-m16-tony-PRIDE.ps.Z The reaction from the RIPE community was very positive. There was interest in all aspects of the PRIDE milestones including the possibility of visiting sites to give selected operators courses. Related to this was a large push at the meeting to get as many routing policies registered in the RIPE routing regis- try. This was done both in the PRIDE presentation and as a separate presentation within the RIPE routing group meeting. The slides of this presentation can be found on: ftp.ripe.net:ripe/presentations/ripe-m16-tony-RRSTATS.ps.Z See Appendix D for a status of the Routing Registry. This will be a regular feature of the monthly report as this a key part to the success of PRIDE. 2.3. PRIDE Mailing list A general mailing list has been created for general discus- sion of all PRIDE related work. The list is known as: pride-list@ripe.net December 2, 1993 - 3 - All mail on this list is archived for back reference. 2.4. PRIDE Tools Release decisions. After some time spent on design and implementation discus- sions of the PRIDE tools, we decided the first two tools (as part of PRIDE-1) will be: prtraceroute A version of the existing traceroute tool which will be able to display whether a route in use is allowed by policy and where deviations from policy occur. The version for the first release would be considerably dif- ferent from the pre-alpha version available before this release. prcheck A tool to check the syntax of AS objects and the con- sistency of routing policies stored in the routing registry. This tool will flag if two neighbouring net- work operators specify conflicting or inconsistent routing information exchanges with each other and also detect global inconsistencies where possible. This way operators can check their AS objects before actually registering them in the RR. It became apparent in the design phase that prcheck and its associated routines would need to be an integral part of all the PRIDE tools (including prtraceroute) eventually building into a library of routines available for pride tools and potentially the RIPE database as well. Also some operators had expressed the need for such a tool because it encourages local experimentation and lowers the barrier to the RR. This was the motivation to replace the originally planned prconfig by prcheck in the PRIDE-1 release. An initial design for prcheck was worked out with the idea of levels of checking. The beta version (see "progress against milestones" below) currently supports five levels (six by first official release) of checking. This ranges from basic syntax to checking routing policy against config- ured peers. 2.5. Houston IETF Whilst no direct presentation of PRIDE was given at the IETF there was keen interest in the project. Tony Bates attended the IETF and talked to many of the operators about the PRIDE project. Many operators were keen to see the release of the tools. Several of the service providers are already using December 2, 1993 - 4 - the RIPE database software and hence should be able to make use of the PRIDE tools locally as well as contacting the RIPE whois server. Some participation has already started with ALTERnet in obtaining their routing policy information and making it available via the RIPE whois server. This has proved to be work well and has helped to shake out some of early problems with the Tools release. 2.6. Database Modifications Tighter syntax checking has been added to the RIPE RR for RIPE-81 based objects to make it easier for the operators and to help with the PRIDE tools testing. As soon as the "prcheck" tool has been fielded this can also be added to the RIPE RR software to align with the PRIDE tools and pro- vide stronger syntax and semantic checking. 2.7. Other Related Presentations. The PRIDE project was presented at the IEPG meeting in Bodega Bay in August, 1993. 3. Related activities 3.1. SWIP A joint proposal between Merit, InterNIC and the RIPE NCC is in progress to progress the "Shared Whois Project" (SWIP) work. This is an effort to align database/registry informa- tion currently held at these sites. This will have some potential impact on the PRIDE project as it is possible some modifications will need to be made to the routing registry formats and objects. The PRIDE project will participate in the SWIP project where needed. A meeting took place at the Houston IETF (including Tony Bates) to progress the SWIP project. Work continues to clean and allign the current databases. This work may also include others. Both a CIX member and a member the JPNIC were also present at this meeting. Unfortunately, no minutes of this meeting are available. The current (still to be updated) SWIP proposal is available from: merit.edu:/pub/nsfnet/swip/swip.txt It is important that the PRIDE project stay involved in the SWIP effort as this has direct impact on the RR. December 2, 1993 - 5 - 3.2. GARR NIS A proposal was made at the RIPE meeting for some possible resource help from the Italian academic network GARR network information service with some development support of routing registry and RIPE database tools. This will be further investigated. 3.3. Something else - A Logo As you have probably noted we have given the PRIDE project a logo. This is seen as important to give PRIDE a formal identity and make operators aware of it's existence. All documents will bare this logo if produced as part of the PRIDE 4. Progress against Milestones 4.1. PRIDE-1 The first milestone of the project, PRIDE-1, expected Week 46 was in fact released in Week 48. It included a beta ver- sion of the first two PRIDE tools. The "prtraceroute" and the "prcheck" tools. Testing is progressing with several service providers. The beta release is available from: ncc.ripe.net:pride-beta/pride-beta.tar.Z 5. PRIDE Planning 5.1. PRIDE-2 It is expected that the first release of the PRIDE Tools (PRIDE-2) will now be released in Week 50 as opposed to week 49. This is due to the late release of the beta release and the need to get as much testing done as possible before the official release. 5.2. PRIDE-3 As part of the preparation for the PRIDE Guide an update of RIPE-81 is planned. This serves two purposes, to get updated objects and attributes into the document and as starting point for the PRIDE Guide. The tutorial style of RIPE-81 lends itself well to some sections of the Guide. It is planned to have a draft of the updated RIPE-81 and a pre- release of the Guide before the end of the year. December 2, 1993 - 6 - 6. Appendices The list of appendices are a regular part of the monthly reports. They are expected to grow as the project evolves. Appendix A - PRIDE documents This contains the list of PRIDE documents. The PRIDE project proposal: mature.ripe.net:tony/tony/pride-prop.ps This is not as yet publically available as it contains budget information. Appendix B - Related documents This contains a list of all PRIDE related documents. RIPE Routing Registry format - RIPE 81 ftp.ripe.net:ripe/docs/ripe-docs/ripe-081.ps SWIP proposal merit.edu:/pub/nsfnet/swip/swip.txt Appendix C - PRIDE tools PRIDE-1 (Beta release of PRIDE-tools 1) ncc.ripe.net:pride-beta/pride-beta.tar.Z Appendix D - Routing Registry (RR) Status State: November 1993 Status of European ASes in RR # of ASes Percentage ____________________________________________________________________________ In RIPE database with Routing Policy information 83 72 % In RIPE database without Routing Policy information 13 11 % Not in RIPE database but in NIC/related databases 15 13 % Unknown in any database 4 4 % ____________________________________________________________________________ Total 115 Table 1: Breakdown of known European routed ASes December 2, 1993