______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT SIG: IX Date: Thursday 2 March 2006 Time: 2.00pm Presentation: Introduction to Euro6IX project Presenter: Jordi Palet ______________________________________________________________________ PHILIP SMITH: OK, next speaker up is Jordi Palet, he will be giving us an introduction to the Euro6IX project. Just a reminder for everybody while Jordi is setting up, if you ask questions, can you state who you are and whatever affiliation you want to announce. And try and keep your speech reasonably slow and clear so that the stenographers and the online listeners can hear what you're saying. Thank you. JORDI PALET: OK. I give already a short presentation in the last APNIC meeting in Vietnam, and I promised to keep a bit more explanation because we didn't have too much time that time. The first thing to say is this project started in 2002. It was designed in 2001. So obviously some of the concepts maybe had changed for some of the RFCs we based the project on has changed. We finished in the middle, end of June 2005. But I think the information here is still useful for some of the ISPs and IXs that may I consider to start running IPv6. The basic idea of this project, Euro6IX, was to try to push the deployment of IPv6 in Europe which at that point, 2001, was very, very, let's say, ancient. So the idea was to try to involve the key players, basically the main ISPs in Europe and in every country. And start getting real experience with IPv6 and bring IPv6 into production services. So the main steps for this project were basically designing and deploying a real IPv6 network, as I just said, it was almost nothing available, real IPv6 services at that time, I'm talking about basically 2002. Research, some advanced services in the network which are often not available. I mean, real IPv6 services at that time. All the network experiences which applications that within the project, and also involving people in the project need to be validated in a kind of user groups and international trials, so we tried to be as much supportive as possible to meet who weren't involved in the project that wanted to get and try some experiences and give their first steps which are be active in dissemination activities and so on. Basically, the idea was to basically promote the deployment of IPv6 in Europe, not only in Europe, we have been active in dissemination all around the world and the members of the project consortium were basically all the European big ISPs. We had Telecom, Vodafone, originally Airtel but guided by Vodafone. As you can understand, this was a research project and basically the entities that participated were the research arms of each of these companies, not necessarily the commercial part of the company but somehow we managed to involve also the commercial parts of those companies. One interesting point is that the complication of the project came out in actually, it was March, 2001, with a very, very small group, trying to tell the commission how we can help to move on towards IPv6 in Europe. And there were a lot of people, mainly from university. I think I was actually the only one not related to university. And all these people were telling the commission we need to invest more and more in getting students involved in IPv6. And while my idea was that we are totally wrong, the universities are going to do IPv6 and I'm going to train IPv6 to people. But what we need to involve is the big ISPs and while I got, let's say, the task from the commission, OK, you have three weeks to create a consortium and make a project if you can make it. In three weeks I succeeded to convince all these people which was not very easy. I think the result was very interesting because in addition to getting the European Commission funding, the European Commission only funds 50% of the projects, except for universities that get 100%. We were also convinced that the commercial parts of most of these operators to actually donate links and to extend the project lifetime, which originally was only three years and it then became 3.5 years, because most of the cost of the links, instead of being brought to the project itself was paid by the companies. They were interested in getting and starting doing some IPv6 things. So there was also two industrial partners, 6 WIND and Telebit, a small Danish company guided by Ericsson. We had three universities, Technical University of Madrid, University of Southampton, University of Murcia. And small companies like my own companies, come from Switzerland and taking part in activities related to portals and a lot of security things related to certificates for example and so on. And there was another interesting thing. The Euro-control, the European agency somehow in control of air traffic. They decided at that time they were still using X 25 and decided they'll move instead, let's move to also IPv6 and while there is already some deployment in that network of IPv6, and up to now the planes don't crash in Europe, so I guess it's working fine. We had also, and this is very strange - I can show later the link for this book and you can get it - there are always, when getting any technology in production, some little things that you need to consider, for example, related to privacy and data protection and so on, we had - when I finish my presentation, I will show you from where you can download this publication. OK, this is the network. Basically, we had one Internet changer at every main city of the square, where this project was carried out, one in Lisbon, London, Torino, Berlin. IPv6 links these changes and then we have different other sites, which were participating in the project, basically, but also ISPs external to the project or other universities or so on. This network was connected which the rest of the IPv6 network respond. Other big projects like 6Net which was similar. Basically in the research and in Europe. And actually was the one that, let's say, put the knowledge on hands of the people to activate IPv6. Basically, related to Internet changes within this project. The idea was, having an infrastructure that provides interconnection services for Layer 3, in such ways that several IXs can make data offering in peering in some networks and for service providers and even getting every IX, using their own TLA. So instead of being dependent on the ISP for the address delegation, having that from the IX itself. OK. I know you - that was an experiment. Project partners used their own TLA to have connectivity to the IX. This is a very, very simple picture of this idea. We have what we call the standard Internet Exchange of customers which gets the addressing of space from the prefix allocated to the IX directly. So we have Layer 2. We started four different models for this IX infrastructure from the traditional one, to one which, the one, we define it as the best one from the project perspective. And it's what we call the IX model C. So it has a Layer 2 infrastructure which is fully redundant. There the router infrastructure from the long-haul providers and the customers and what we call the Layer 3 mediation function router which is the real new element in this infrastructure. OK. So the idea - the place where we come out with the idea for this structure basically comes from the previous person of the RFC 23474 and the function role between the ISPs and the customers. Routing is about the same as you can see in any transit network. From that sense, it is nothing new. You can have route servers or whatever you need to run this infrastructure. We built also a lot of tools to do in relation of this, before going into the real deployment. So here is how the address assignment works. Basically, you have two options - IPv6 addresses assigned by the long-haul ISPs. The network itself was behaving, 6bone was behaving like another one of those providers. And we had one of these long-haul providers. Or the IPv6 addressing can be assigned by the address that I explained before. Same for the routing, you have the autonomous system within the network of IXs and you have iBGP, nothing new. And from the service perspective, what we try to do is also to understand how making services in the Internet exchange can be interesting for ISPs and the customers. So making the IX is a kind of place where this service could be concentrated and some of the network services like DNSSEC and mobility services, transition mechanisms, route server mechanisms, different kind of applications like word servers, media conference, peer-to-peer applications and also a lot of monitoring services. The idea somehow is also to see this kind of IX as a possible way for the ISPs to create virtual ISPs. OK, I know they don't like. KURT LINDQVIST: A fee-based infrastructure that provides services to customers is traditionally called an ISP and ISPs do the jobs of ISPs has traditionally not been long-lived? RANDY BUSH: I think it's wonderful. IPv6 exchange points can do this whereas IPv4 exchange points just switch traffic. This is a fantastic advantage. JORDI PALET: I thought you don't like it. One concrete example of this Internet Exchange which is live still - because whether the project finished, some of the partners decided to take it down but some others decided to keep it working and this is the case for the UK Internet Exchange, or UK 6X which in the Layer 3, IPv6 Internet Exchange. It was the first one in the UK to offer IPv6 services. Used commercial IPv6 services. At that time there was a lot of use of 6bone. It is not recommended or necessary. So it's located in telehouse and an Open Internet Exchanger and it's still following the aims of the project of motivating the deployment of IPv6 and further understanding of IPv6. I don't think that's needed as much but it was one of the basic goals. They have an Internet switch for the layer two peering, they have switch for additional customer access mechanisms, they have a router for the layer three functionality. They used 2001: 618:/32 used for address allocation. They have different tools via Looking Glass, ASpath-free etc. This is the basic structure. They have connectivity to GPRS networks and a lot of demonstration and activities which GPRS and mobility like IPv6, they have to 6to4 and so on. One of the services that we tried also is DNS services in general and especially DNSSEC services from the perspective of what you may know about DNSSEC, it's nothing new, just making the service available from the exchange. I was trying to explain a couple of slides. I got interrupted and forgot about it. The idea was to from this perspective, you can create, let's say Y box and virtual ISPs. You have several ISPs sharing some infrastructure. They can probably lower their cost if they can put together most of their service and of course that has good advantages from the perspective of saving costs but it has disadvantages in the sense that they are competing or they are, let's say, less competitive from the customer because the customer is not tied to the address of an ISP because even if he change the ISP within the same region, he will keep the same addresses. It may be very nice from the customer perspective but from the ISP it may be a disadvantage. I think that's the final vision of this structure where you have all the security, quality of service and services transition, that may be how some of them collated in the IX itself. I was quicker than I expected. That's it. KURT LINDQVIST: I'd like to paraphrase my dear friend, Randy. I would encourage all my competing ISPs to do this. The ones of you that want to have remaining cash flows, if there is something useful to do about IPv6, you would go to your local friendly RIR and ask for your ISP address space and you leave this to your customers, the ISPs who traditional provide services to exchange traffic over your LAN and you go on minding your own business. Which is what the rest of us do. JORDI PALET: I must say that we got, of course, negative feedback but we got some positive feedback. Actually, I remember right now I don't remember exactly what city but someone in Canada was telling us that they, I'm talking about two years ago or 1.5 years ago, they said they like it a lot. And they deploy it on IX following our model and at the moment they didn't explain and so I don't know. Everything has good things, bad things, advantages and disadvantages. That was a research project. The IX was a starting point for creating this project but the important thing for the project was to all IPv6 movement that we created around the IX and a lot of development activities, porting of applications and, yes, the IX was an important part but there was a lot of additional things and I cannot disclose because that was part of the confidentiality. And business models following this approach and, well, I don't know what they're going to do. If they're going to deploy it commercially or not but some of them have very, very interesting ideas out of this model. So, of course, it may happen, it may not, maybe some people like it or dislike it but it's one more possibility. BILL WOODCOCK: The fact that someone expressed a preference for this two years ago and hasn't explained since does not strike me as strong evidence. JORDI PALET: It was a joke. RANDY BUSH: Jordi, the truth is or at least my perception is, what we're really looking at here is an IPv6 multi-provider deployment test bed, not an exchange point. And so, we can make a lot of fun, but indeed if we turn this and look at it as a v6 multi-provider deployment test bed, then there are probably some lessons learned. It would be fun next time, maybe not in an IX SIG but at a v6 SIG, to work out what worked well and what didn't and why and that would be very helpful because despite the fact we make all the jokes, many of us are living with v6 to some extent. I'm from IIJ. To many of us, this tunnelling stuff is hardly scary and less bad lessons we learned. There are other things you're trying - not the marketing side - but why some things didn't work I'd like to know and what we have to do to make them work? JORDI PALET: You're right on that and probably not belong to the IX SIG because there was something, I think I had in one of the slides and maybe I mistaken, there was something that was a very evident learning lesson, that if you do that, if you do this, obviously you cannot predict the return for your traffic. That's the main learned lesson from this model. And this is a problem that if we go into this model or if somebody goes into this model, we need to understand that very clearly. You cannot predict where you're getting the traffic back. That's a very, very important lesson. PHILIP SMITH: Do we have any other questions or comments for Jordi? That's a bad message to say that there is access to a Layer 3 point. RANDY BUSH: Pushing Layer 3 exchange points for years? When? Want the email now? From you, Woody. PHILIP SMITH: OK. Thank you very much.