______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Session: APNIC Member Meeting Date: Friday 3 March 2006 Time: 11.00am Presentation: IANA report Presenter: David Conrad ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON: Last but not least is David Conrad, not from an RIR. From IANA and ICANN. DAVID CONRAD: I'm David Conrad, I'm the general manager of IANA. I'm not going to be giving you statistics this time. I thought I'd try something different. Instead, I'm going to give you a status report of what IANA is doing right now. As many of you, all of you, hopefully, most of you presumably, know IANA has a set of functions that we do. We allocate v4, v6 and ASN numbers to the regional registries. We maintain - this includes us actually reviewing every Internet draft that goes through looking for IANA considerations. We also allocate all the OIDs. When entering international treaty organisations it is odd that IANA is the registry for that but that's the way things were worked historically. We do root zone management. There is a whole lot of other grey bits that I didn't think you'd care that much about. Correct me if I'm wrong, I can probably add them the next time. It might make things about the size of a pixel. Barbara is our operations manager and we just hired Yoshiko, who is there in the yellow. There are two boxes over here. If anybody is happening to be looking for a job, we're hiring. So, current activities - some administrative stuff. We have migrated or are in the process of finishing up the migration to our system there was a brief interlude where IANA had decided that they were a software development house and had worked on their own system where there was a migration prior to my joining to that system. It wasn't quite done yet. And IANA needed our job done. So we moved back. All the IANA data that has been collected over the years, there's a lot of paper stuff that has just been sitting in boxes and collecting dust. We do OCR on it and scan it and put it into a document management system. We're redesigning the IANA web page and we've purchased a product that generates pretty pictures to show to the board and to management because they really like pretty pictures. More significantly, we're automating a loss of the processes that exist at the IANA. For a long time, most of the tasks that were done at the IANA were done manually and these computer things that I hear have some promise, so we decided to use them. The eIANA automation effort is made by folks in Poland. It's for the root management stuff. The root zone management stuff. We are automating the private enterprise numbers which are also known as OIDs generally, so that basically it's a very easy task to automate, so we're going to automate it. One of the other things we're working on in cooperation with Geoff is basically cleaning up the IANA address allocation registry. Yoshiko is taking that on as her first task. We're in the process of implementing a 24/7 call centre support because primarily people want the ability to call at us and scream at us - sorry, discuss things with us. So we have, we're in the process of getting 24/7 call centre. As I mentioned, we're hiring, if you happen to be looking for a job. So here are a couple of screen shots of the new IANA home page that's under development. Sort of a preview of things that we're going to be proposing. The way IANA works, it's very difficult for us to sneeze without getting approval from someone or multiple bodies. We're going to be generating these new web pages and presenting them to the various constituencies for them to say, "What were you thinking?" And hopefully get some sort of consensus that it doesn't suck or at least as much as the current IANA web page. It's more colourful. The intent is to make it easy to find things that people are interested in, as opposed to the current IANA page which is designed to make people get lost. This is going to be the new root management page. It has a clipable map down there that if you happen to know where your country is you can click on it and it will do the whois thing. I get to use the laser now. The little stats, coming soon thing. That's going to integrate into the report's generation thing so you can get semi-live reports about what IANA is doing which most of the time is sitting back and eating popcorn and watching the movies. As I mentioned, we do a lot of protocol stuff for the IETF. This is the matrix, not the matrix we all live in, but the port protocol matrix that is where all the various registries, the various protocol parameters live. It's actually a fairly big page but it is the IETF mandated us to develop it this way. So it's this really long page. And this thing up here at the top is a way to jump down to if you happen to know the protocol parameter you're looking for, you can jump to it quickly. Otherwise, oh, well. This is probably unreadable. (Refers to screen). This is a screen shot of the web page of eIANA. We're integrating this into the web page. If you can't see it, the presentation is on the APNIC web page and you'll be able to see the URL there. You can go there now and play around with it. It works. It has anything that you might want to do as a TLD manager. How many TLD managers are here? OK, a few. So, it's a nice little package that was written by the folks in Poland for the IANA and we're actually integrating it into the IANA now. So that's all the stuff that's happening currently. We're actually fairly busy. There are a few things that we plan on getting done hopefully before the meeting that is in July or August or something. Which is when you want to go to Morocco. We're going to be ex-analysing the various registries so that we can generate the registries. Right now the registries are maintained. And we want to generate them automatically any time there is a change in any of the aspects of the registries, you push a button and it dumps out the new ones. We're at the IANA who only does name stuff. And in discussions last night, I discovered that it does name stuff. I always thought it did both. Live and learn. We're going to add address registry stuff to the IANA whois service. We're continuing on the IANA process automation task. We're going to be implementing stuff to make DNSSEC signing of the root zone and we're going to be automating the port allocation function. And we've actually been in discussions with someone you might be familiar with, John Earls, to do a survey. To see how many people rate us failing and how many people rate us poor? I'm sure there are other categories there but we'll see. On the horizon, things that we're looking at, looking to do in the future, we're going to be working somehow with a certificate authority in one way or another with the regional registries. I don't actually know what this means yet, so you can just ask Geoff because he knows everything about this, or George or Randy. One of the biggest problems IANA has is in trying to authenticate people who come to us requesting services with RIRs, it's not really a problem, because all the RIR guys are completely trustworthy. However, there are folks who are maybe less trustworthy and they come to us and ask us to change things and we have some difficulty in figuring out if they should be, and if they actually should be requesting it, whether the change they're requesting is appropriate. So we're going to be working on some sort of improved authorisation mechanism. It may imply hardware tokens that will imply some sort of hard crypto which I can enjoy many visits with governmental officials in the US, more than I already have. Root zone management right now is very, shall we say, primitive. We're actually moving to use this thing, called the Internet, to do the root zone management, causing something called EPP. We'll be doing that with VeriSign. Automated inaddra.ip6.arpa delegation as well. We have discussed in the past making the registries that IANA provides available. Some mechanism, the actual mechanism we're currently discussing - I have had some folks that come to me and say, "Let's use BEP." Others say, "How can you not use SOAP?" One might say a single point of failure with regards to the IANA in that it exists primarily in Marina del Rey, California, which, if you don't know, you can sort of considerate it sitting on top of a bowl of jelly. It's actually built on landfill, the area where the IANA building is, where the ICANN building is. If there's a major earthquake, it will get really exciting. We want to replicate some of our servers off to different places. We actually have an office in Belgium, I guess Belgium's safe, at least, physically. Summarising - we do a lot of stuff with numbers and identifiers. That's part of the contract that IANA has with the Department of Commerce under agreement or something with the US Government. The MoU with ICANN, there's a tangled relationship there that I haven't worked out. I'm hoping before I retire I will be able to work it out. We have been adding stuff at IANA. We have brought in consultants to try and improve our service and try to address the backlog that is created over the past. Contrary to popular belief, this guy, Emile Coue, did not kill himself. He's a psychologist, he came up with the phrase but did not kill himself. Five days, six days a week, trying to reduce the backlogs that have existed for quite a while. There's a lot of stuff that we need to do still and we are going to continue to be busy but that shouldn't discourage you for applying for a job at IANA. If anyone has any suggestions on how we can improve things, please let me know - I'm always interested. PAUL WILSON: Thank you, David. APPLAUSE STEPHANE BORTZMEYER: The one thing everyone is talking about, requests for information, issued by the US Government about IANA management? I may explain this. DAVID CONRAD: The explanation that I have received on this is that it is a part of the normal process under which the US Government issues RFPs. Because initially the ICANN contract or MoU contract or whatever was done as a sole source, the Department of Commerce did not have a full set of criteria under which they would expect the IANA to operate. The RFI process, which is part of the normal governmental RFP process, I'm told, is intended to obtain information about how people will meet the functions that were defined within the RFI itself. That would then go into the Department of Commerce who would look at it, decide if there's sufficient interest if no-one responds, they'll have to sole source it again. If multiple people respond, they will have to determine which of the criteria was relevant based on the input provided. And that would go into the RFP for the subsequent renewal of the contract. Basically, that was the long version. The short version is that the RFI is the first step in the process by of which the Department of Commerce will either decide to issue a rebid for the IANA contract or not. So the excitement over the RFI has been a little confusing to me because it's actually not unusual. Everyone has known that - well, not everyone - the IANA rebid thing has been discussed quite a bit for quite a while. The fact the US Government has issued an RFI should not come as a surprise to anyone. STEPHANE BORTZMEYER: Not a surprise, just a confirmation that IANA answers to the US Government, not the Internet community? DAVID CONRAD: It's not an either/or. It's not exclusive. IANA, I report to Paul, Paul can tell me things to do. He frequently does. PAUL WILSON: Paul Twoomey, that is. DAVID CONRAD: But the current organisational structure under which IANA functions has been a contract via the US Department of Commerce. The intent was that, my understanding, was that eventually the US Government would say to ICANN, "You're old enough to leave the nest now," but for various reasons, among which I'm told, where other governments saying ICANN was not old enough yet, the US Government decided not to say ICANN is old enough to leave the nest. PAUL WILSON: I might say thanks for the answer and remind us we're running up against lunch and we still have EC meeting preparations. There will be time for open mike after lunch. DAVID CONRAD: I'm happy to discuss if anyone is interested in it. PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks very much. DAVID CONRAD: Thank you. APPLAUSE