Transcript - APNIC Services

Sunny Chendi: I would like to invite Laurence Benjamin to come up. For paying on time, before the cut-off day, to support this Conference. Benjamin, please. It's a D-Link IPv6 router.

APPLAUSE

Sunny Chendi: This is APNIC Services forum. We introduce this in APNIC 32 and we continue to do this in APNIC Conferences. This is an opportunity for our members and stakeholders to see what we are doing in terms of our services to our members and stakeholders, and I have my colleagues here to give an update of work in progress or something that's coming in line with our strategies and our objectives.

As I said, this is an opportunity for you to share your feedback with us, so we can continuously improve our services to provide to our members and stakeholders.

First up, I'll invite my colleague Guangliang to discuss about IPv4 address transfers.

Guangliang Pan: Good morning, everyone. My name is Guangliang Pan, the registration service manager at APNIC. Today I would like to talk about IPv4 transfer.

I will speak slowly. I think I don't have the time limit this time.

In my presentation, I will cover the following information. First, I will give an overview on the IPv4 transfer policy. Why do we need the policy? When has the policy been implemented? What the policy says? Who can use the policy? I will talk about this in my first session of the presentation.

Then I will talk about the transfers within the APNIC region and how can an APNIC member transfer their IPv4 address space to another APNIC member. What is the procedure? Is it the transfer happening? So I will give some statistical data. I will also discover how the APNIC Hostmaster evaluates IPv4 transfers.

Then I will talk about the hot topic, inter-RIR transfers. You are probably aware that ARIN just implemented their inter-RIR transfer policy, which allows the IPv4 address to be transferred from ARIN region to APNIC region. What is the procedure and how can an organization in ARIN region transfer their IPv4 address to an APNIC member? What kind of information do they need to submit to the RIRs? I will talk about the procedures and also the transfer template.

First, I would like to give an overview of the IPv4 transfer policy. Why do we need it? The main reason for this transfer policy is to allow for the efficient use of the unused IPv4 address space, also to maintain the integrity of the APNIC registration database.

We know that IPv4 transfer is going to happen during the IPv4 exhaustion. This policy actually formally recognises those transfers and allows them to register them in the APNIC Whois Database.

When has the policy been implemented? Actually there were a few policy proposals related to the IPv4 transfer policy. Back in February 2010, APNIC has implemented the intra-APNIC transfer policy. We normally call it prop-050. Actually, it's before APNIC reached to the final /8.

At that time, APNIC members still can receive IPv4 delegation from APNIC as usual. So not many people were actually using that transfer policy when it was implemented at that time.

But after APNIC reached the final /8 in April 2011, people actually started using the policy to transfer IPv4 address space within APNIC region, between the APNIC members.

In August 2011, APNIC also implemented another policy proposal, prop-095, which allows the IPv4 transfer to happen between APNIC and other regions.

Later, in November, there was another policy proposal called maintaining demonstrated needs requirement in the transfer policy after the final /8 phase. We call it prop-096. It's also implemented.

This is actually adding the Hostmaster evaluation to the IPv4 transfer. A recipient who needs IPv4 transfer still needs to demonstrate the need.

Before that, for a few months, the APNIC member actually had the freedom to transfer their IPv4 address space between member accounts. They actually can do it automatically in MyAPNIC without APNIC Hostmaster evaluation, because there's no need to demonstrate the need, like after the final /8. A few members have taken advantage. They were just moving around the IPv4 space between the membership accounts. They may have different membership accounts based on the location and different service. But after that, all the transfer has to be evaluated by APNIC Hostmaster, based on the need.

Recently, you probably heard that ARIN implemented the inter-RIR transfer policy on 31 July this year. So this has now become a hot topic. This allows the transfer between APNIC and ARIN to happen.

Please note, only APNIC and ARIN have implemented the inter-RIR transfer policy at this stage. The inter-RIR transfer possible will happen between APNIC and ARIN in the coming months.

Here is the outline of the policy regarding the needs requirement. The recipients that do not already hold IPv4 resources must demonstrate a detailed plan for the use of the transferred resources. Recipients that already hold IPv4 resources must demonstrate a detailed plan for the use of the transferred resource, show their past usage rate, provide evidence of compliance with APNIC policies with respect to past delegations.

This is actually exactly the same as IPv4 requested in the past. APNIC Hostmaster is based on this to do the evaluation. This means a new member, if you don't have any IPv4 resource, you need to show us the detailed plan to use the transfer resource. If you are an existing APNIC member and holding IPv4 resource, you also need to show us how those IPv4 resources have been used. APNIC offers a pre-approval service. You can submit approval via MyAPNIC and the Hostmaster can do a pre-approval for you so that you can easily get the transfer done.

Who can use the transfer policy? All current APNIC account holders and organizations in other RIR regions that also have an inter-RIR transfer policy. Currently, actually it's ARIN. The organization in ARIN region and also all the APNIC members actually can use this transfer policy.

Now, I move on to the transfers within the APNIC region first. How can an APNIC member transfer their IPv4 resource to another APNIC member? What is the procedure? Please see this flowchart. You can see from this diagram there's two APNIC members there. One is the recipient account and the other one is the source account. The transfer has happened between two APNIC members. Between them, there is the APNIC Hostmaster.

What is the procedure? How is it going to happen? Step 1 is pre-approval process. If you would like to receive IPv4 transfer, this means you need IPv4 address space. The first thing you need to do is submit a pre-approval to APNIC Hostmaster. This can be easily done via MyAPNIC and George, my colleague, later will show you how actually you do it in MyAPNIC. It is very simple, the same as the IPv4 address request.

APNIC Hostmaster will respond to you in the next working day. It's very quick. So it is not a problem to get your pre-approval in advance.

After you get the pre-approval, this means you are just fine to receive IPv4 address space. You have complied with the policy. Then you can go to look for the source.

Then you can find if another APNIC member has spare IPv4 addresses to transfer to you, right? You approach them. You can also list your need on the APNIC website.

APNIC provides an IPv4 listing service, transfer listing service. We can list your need on our website. Anyone who has spare IPv4 addresses can contact you via APNIC.

Once you've found a source and also you reach the agreement with them, this is step 2. APNIC is not involved in any negotiation between the seller and the buyer or the recipient or source organization. APNIC is neutral. APNIC is not involved in any negotiation.

Once you reach the agreement, the source account has to initiate the IPv4 transfer in MyAPNIC. It's only in MyAPNIC. This is the APNIC members. Because you are an APNIC member, you have access to MyAPNIC and you can only transfer out your resource in MyAPNIC.

When the source account initiates the transfer request, the APNIC Hostmaster will see it and then we just do a double-check and if nothing is wrong we can just transfer the resource from the source account into the recipient account. That is step 4.

Transfers between APNIC members is simple and easy because you are in the same system. The source accounts and recipient accounts are all in MyAPNIC. You can initiate the transfer actually in MyAPNIC and we can approve it very easily.

This is the summary of the procedures for the transfers within APNIC region. I would like to strongly recommend, whoever needs IPv4 address, please submit your pre-approval in MyAPNIC first. Then you can also get your pre-approval listed in the APNIC listing service.

I don't want you to get the agreement with the source, but you don't have pre-approval in MyAPNIC. In that case, if your IPv4 transfer is not justified then you may get in trouble. We don't want that to happen.

So I will strongly recommend to any company that would like to receive IPv4 transfer, the first thing you do is submit your IPv4 request. Actually, it's a pre-approval in MyAPNIC, so you can see how many IPv4 you can receive, so you won't get in trouble later when you find a source.

Then when you locate the source, you can reach agreement with them and the source will initiate the IPv4 transfer in MyAPNIC and the Hostmaster will process the transfer. It is a simple procedure.

Has anyone used the IPv4 transfer policy so far? We often receive this kind of question. I captured the data since APNIC reached final /8 to the end of last month. This is the data showing up in the screen.

You can see we have had a lot of transfers happen.

You can see the blue bar is the transfers of unused IPv4 address space. This means people use this new transfer policy, which I just mentioned before, to transfer the IPv4 resource between APNIC members. The yellow one is the merger and acquisition. We call this normal transfer. This has always happened since APNIC start.

Because the members may purchase another company, so the transfer is based on the merger and acquisition.

It seems a similar amount between these two types of transfers. I counted it. It was 157 transfers total and I think 79 is transfers based for those unused IPv4 address space and 78 is about transfers due to merger and acquisition. Exactly 50:50, actually. It's very interesting.

You can also see, from this year, that transfers are actually a bit more than last year. You see from January 2012, the transfer is a bit more, compared to last year. It is happening.

How does the APNIC Hostmaster evaluate the IPv4 transfer? I can tell you here that we do team evaluation. All the IPv4 transfers have to be evaluated by the team. We have APNIC Hostmaster internal mailing list. All the transfer requests will be sent to the mailing list and Hostmaster team will do a review on that. If the size is large, this also will be sent to the senior management review team. We are trying to ensure all the transfers are according to the policy and also fairness and consistency.

APNIC Hostmaster is also carefully monitoring any transfers related to the final /8. So far, we only found a few cases. It's not many. But the policy doesn't stop people transferring the space in the final /8 at this stage.

We also have a transfer log to record all the transfers. The transfer log is public. It's on the APNIC website. You can see all the IPv4 transfers are actually using this transfer policy.

I will now move on to the inter-RIR transfers. How can an ARIN member transfer their IPv4 resource to an APNIC member? What is the procedure? Please look at this flowchart. There's an APNIC member, ARIN member, APNIC Hostmaster and ARIN Hostmaster. There will be four parties involved in this inter-RIR transfer. This is a simple case.

I use ARIN to APNIC as an example to show the procedure. I believe this will be most of the cases.

Of course, an APNIC member can also transfer IPv4 to ARIN region. It is two-way transfer. But basically, I expect it will be more from ARIN to APNIC because APNIC region is the region which is short of IPv4 resource. The ARIN region, they have some legacy IPv4 address space. They are actually not from ARIN, they are legacy address space. They have probably not fully used those space and this can be transferred to APNIC region to use this transfer policy.

Now let's see. How can an ARIN member transfer their IPv4 resource to APNIC member? The first step is still pre-approval procedure. We still recommend APNIC member to submit your IPv4 request to APNIC first if you need more IPv4 address space. We call it pre-approval process. You can just submit your pre-approval in MyAPNIC.

APNIC Hostmaster will do the evaluation based on your document and the information you provided and we will ask you more questions if you don't provide enough information to APNIC Hostmaster. If you provide enough information to APNIC Hostmaster, we will approve your request. There will be a pre-approval sitting in your APNIC member account.

For example, you need a /16 and then we approve it and then you will see you will have /16 pre-approved sitting on your account and then you can look for the source. Any time you find the source, you can just tell APNIC and then we can transfer it.

This first step is still pre-approval. After you get the pre-approval, then you look for the source. You can list your need in MyAPNIC. You can also go to the ARIN website to look for the information. As Leslie just mentioned in the previous presentation, ARIN report, they also have a lot of useful information regarding the inter-RIR transfer on the ARIN website.

You can also go there to have a look.

When you've found the source and also reached the agreement with them, this is step 2. So you reach agreement with the source and the source will submit the transfer request to ARIN Hostmaster. This is step 3.

The inter-RIR transfer is also initiated by the source company. They have to initiate the transfer by contacting ARIN Hostmaster. This is step 3.

When ARIN Hostmaster receives the transfer request from their member, they will do the evaluation, based on their policy. If they have complied with the policy and ARIN Hostmaster approves the transfer, they will forward the transfer request to APNIC Hostmaster. That is step 4.

When APNIC Hostmaster receives the transfer request from ARIN, we will notify our member, yes, we got this request from ARIN, and also ask you to confirm: Is this what you want? Once you confirm, then we will coordinate with ARIN Hostmaster to proceed with the transfer.

The transfer between RIRs is a bit complicated, because this involves two systems, two databases. Also, there is a different membership style, different procedures.

We also need to update the reverse DNS. This is the most complicated part. So we will coordinate with ARIN Hostmaster to get this done for you.

Once it is complete, then we will delegate the resource to APNIC Hostmaster and tell ARIN Hostmaster we have put this into the APNIC database. ARIN will remove this resource from the ARIN database and also notify the ARIN member, saying, this has gone.

This is the procedural flowchart to show how an ARIN member transfers IPv4 resource to an APNIC member.

Here is the summary of the procedure. I will not repeat it, but I would still just want to recommend APNIC members, please do your pre-approval before you get into looking for a resource.

What information do you need to provide to the NIRs during the inter-RIR transfer? Here is the inter-RIR transfer template. Both the recipient and source organization of course have to provide their information. From the source, you need to provide the IP address range you are going to transfer and your organization name and the allocation date, the original allocation date, of course.

From the recipient, you need to provide the organization name, address, contact name, contact phone number, contact email address and we also would like to have a brief description of the transfer. For example, why you do this transfer and what exactly this transfer means. So give us some idea why you want this to happen.

This is the basic information. It's like all the RIR transfers have to complete this template. This template actually has to be submitted by the source organization to the respective RIR. It's not the recipient.

As a recipient, if you are APNIC member, you receive IPv4 transfer, you need to provide your contact information to the source company, so that they can fill in this template for you. When they send this template to ARIN and ARIN forwards this template to APNIC, we know who actually this IPv4 will transfer to.

There's also some additional information in the template, like you will specify the source RIR, recipient RIR and also the organization or membership ID. In APNIC's case it is the APNIC member account; for ARIN may be the organization ID. This information actually will help APNIC and ARIN Hostmasters quickly to allocate to your organization, so who is actually receiving the IPv4 transfer.

I would like to give a quick summary. In my presentation, I give an overview of the IPv4 transfer policy and I also talk about the transfers within the APNIC region and the transfer between APNIC and other RIRs.

For more information about the IPv4 transfer, you can actually go to the APNIC website. We have a transfer page. There is a lot of information including the procedure and the frequently asked questions and the transfer template and so on.

During the meeting, if you have any questions about the transfer, you can also go to the help desk which is just outside the meeting room. If you would like to discuss in detail your case, you can book an APNIC Hostmaster consultation and then talk to the Hostmaster about the detail of your case.

I think I have finished my presentation. I will take questions now. Are there any questions?

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): During pre-approval, you said that APNIC will follow a transparent process to transfer the IPs. Is there any case where this transfer can be rejected? Because I'm talking of the commercial transfer from one company to another company. For example, we have a commercial arrangement with a supplying company, IPs to us, and we go to APNIC and what are the circumstances in which APNIC may reject this transfer?

Guangliang Pan: Sorry, I'm really not very clear, because I didn't hear.

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): Let me try to repeat.

Guangliang Pan: Can you repeat it?

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): Yes. Let us say we are making an arrangement to take IPs from one company who is supplying the IP block, to transfer, so then we go to APNIC for approval. What are the circumstances where APNIC may say this transfer is not possible?

Guangliang Pan: I think so far, we haven't got that case.

I think we do have some case that the member don't have pre-approval in advance and then they already reach agreement with the seller and also the seller has initiated the transfer in MyAPNIC, and then in that case we will ask our member to submit an IPv4 request form and then they provide the justifications to receive those resources.

But that's why we strongly recommend our members to get the pre-approval before.

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): Thank you.

Kenny Huang (APNIC EC): Thank you for your presentation.

One question in my mind is, I'm not sure in the situation you mentioned regarding to all the transfer procedure, whether it covers all kinds of scenarios or not. For instance, if a legacy address space holder who unfortunately does not belong to any of the RIRs is going to have an outbound transfer to an APNIC member, what sort of procedure would be followed? Thank you.

Guangliang Pan: Actually, it's a good question. A lot of those legacy space holders, they may not have an account with the RIRs, maybe. In APNIC's case, if you are holding historical or legacy address space and you would like to transfer your legacy space, the first thing is you have to become an APNIC account holder, claim your resource into your account and then you can transfer it out.

You will have to sign some legal document to say this resource belongs to you. Then if you would like, transfer it out.

Randy Bush (IIJ): So I have to pay you money and become a member to transfer my address space to somebody else? That was a "yes" or "no" question.

Guangliang Pan: George will answer your question.

George Kuo: Perhaps I can help or make an attempt to answer the question. We do have policy for managing historical address space. For those organizations that have historical address space, that would like to make change or update the registration in APNIC's database, under the policy, they can claim it under the main historical address maintenance policy; and to do that, the policy requires them to sign a membership agreement with APNIC.

There is a minimum fee for them to -- well, they pay -- yes, they have to pay APNIC under that policy to sign an agreement and I believe it's just a minimum annual maintenance fee they have to pay.

I hope that --

Randy Bush (IIJ): So there's a difference between becoming a full member, which is what I heard, and what you just said.

George Kuo: Okay.

Randy Bush (IIJ): Could you clarify?

Guangliang Pan: The holder, we call it account holder --

George Kuo: Yes. We do have a non-membership category, where a lot of these historical address space holders --

Randy Bush (IIJ): I understood that, George. That was clear.

George Kuo: Yes.

Randy Bush (IIJ): Those nominal fee account holders of historical space can transfer?

George Kuo: As long as they have an account with APNIC, regardless whether it is a non-member or member, they can do the transfer.

Randy Bush (IIJ): Thank you.

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): You said that there will be a small amount. Is that amount specified somewhere?

George Kuo: It's a yearly maintenance fee. I don't have the exact figure now, but I can provide that number to you.

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): My second question is, will this transfer add to my address space block? For example, APNIC membership is on the basis of the number of IPs which a member holds. So if I get a certain number of IPs transferred from some other RIR to me, would my membership change?

George Kuo: Let me try to understand your question. If you have a non-member account --

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): I have a member account. I'm a small member. But if I get IP addresses, a large block, transferred to me, so if that block I would have received from APNIC, I would have become a large member, so my fees will increase.

George Kuo: Under the current APNIC membership fee schedule, your renewal fee is calculated based on the total resource holding. Yes, if you transfer some IP address space into your account at the renewal time, that address space will be considered to calculate your renewal fee, which is what is happening now. It's just that because you are receiving IP resources from the transfer instead of from APNIC directly.

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): But that is what Randy asked just now, that it means that I will start paying more money, not more than only $100 for the address block which comes from some other organization to me.

George Kuo: It is correct, under the current fee schedule.

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): It is not $100, it could be more amount as well. Randy Bush (IIJ): I think I can clarify. That was not my question. My question is, as the seller, did I have to become a full member and pay for full in that address space as if I had rented it normally from APNIC? I believe the answer I heard was "no". I just am a nominal member, the seller pays $100 a year or something like that, which, thanks, is perfectly reasonable.

What I heard from his question, which is much more interesting, is if I receive address space on a transfer, there are two cases. One is the address space I received is from a full member who was renting it from APNIC, because APNIC is in the integer rental business; that is added to my pool and it seems obvious that I will continue to rent it as the buyer.

But if the source of the address space was historical space, APNIC never allocated that space.

That was not APNIC rental integers. So you have changed the nature of it when I receive it, if you were asking me to pay, as Naresh or whoever it was asked, for the major increment in my size, that's a more interesting question.

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): Thanks, Randy. This exactly was my question. Thank you.

George Kuo: Let me try to answer Randy's question. In that scenario, okay, if you receive address space under the current IPv4 transfer policy into your account, and if it's approved, yes, resources will be moved into your account.

In the case where you're holding a non-membership account, then your fee is calculated under the non-membership fee schedule, but if you are holding a membership account, then the fee is calculated accordingly.

Guangliang Pan: Are there any more questions?

Sunny Chendi: Gentlemen, would you like to come to the microphone?

Randy Bush (IIJ): Geoff is passing the blame, because I was policy chair at the time.

Geoff is saying -- actually, it turns out, the pixels he showed me seem to say that if it's historical space, whatever you want to call it here, if I am a historical holder and I get historical space, it's not decided or specified. Open hole. That's this moment's guess.

So I don't think it's reasonable to ask you for a formal answer or anybody else, George. I think what we've discovered is there's some decision space here that hasn't been worked out and it can be fun for somebody to work on it.

Sunny Chendi: Thank you, Guangliang.

Guangliang Pan: Thank you, everyone.

APPLAUSE

Sunny Chendi: Thanks for taking part in that presentation, asking questions and making comments as well.

The next one is APNIC membership profiling, George Kuo.

George Kuo: Good morning, all. I'm George Kuo, member services manager. This morning I'd just like to share a couple of projects that we have been working on. The first one is the membership profiling and the second one is on the IPv4 transfer.

I hope that the second part of the information will complement what Guangliang has just explained to you about procedure and policy and so on.

To start, I would like to share this graph with you on new membership growth. At the time when the news of IPv4 exhaustion was announced, we were kind of wondering what the membership growth trend is going to be like in the future.

By having a look at this one, I think the figures speak best for themselves. You can see that we are still seeing a kind of steady trend of membership growth. In fact, in 2011, our new membership growth, the first time, got over 500 new members in 2011. If you look at the number in 2012, you can also see that some of the months probably have the highest new number of members in the history.

We are constantly on the lookout for trying to improve our service delivery and see how we can better do the work that we are expected to do. I think one way to do that is to be able to understand your customers better, to know who they are, where they come from.

Let's have a look at what's current now. With the organization joining APNIC's members, they have some sort of various motivations or needs. We know that if anyone is interested, they can join APNIC as a member without holding any resources, and obviously there are a lot of organizations out there that have the need for Internet resources. But to be able to get resources, there are certain policy criteria they have to fulfil to be able to get these resources, such as for ISPs, they need to meet the allocation criteria, critical infrastructure, Internet exchange and so on; all these various different policies.

On the other side, we also know that many of these organizations are providing Internet infrastructure services, such as ISP, providing ADSL, mobile connectivity and so on. But we are also seeing quite a lot of these organizations rely on the Internet to deliver their product services. This is as much as we know about them.

Let me give you this example of the profiling that we are working on. With this, we are able to get a little bit more detail on, such as the industry type.

We are using the example from Australia here. What you see with these different colours, we are actually using a UN ISIC, which I think means International Standard Industrial Classification.

You see the big piece of blue there that shows it's information and communication industry, but you also see over 50 per cent of various different industries. This is what we can get from this membership profiling.

Another example here is the data we can also extract, looking at the growth, the year and the particular industry type.

In addition to asking or finding out where they are from, what industry they are, we are also asking them how these resources are used. For example, an organization could use their resources for various different purposes.

As I mentioned earlier, with this information we aim to be able to understand our membership better and aim to provide better services. With the information, we also hoping to use it and be able to communicate appropriately and accordingly.

How do we do this? This is actually coming as a result of we are introducing a new membership sign-up form pretty soon this quarter. We are in the test phase now. The new form is also designed to improve the new member experience when they sign up and there will be a form there for them to easily provide that information to APNIC. There will be questions asking their industry type and multiple options for them to choose what they are going to use the Internet resources for.

We also know that this information may not be static all the time and it could change in the future. So after we launch this new form, we will be adding features in MyAPNIC to allow the existing account holders to continue to update that information, so we will also have the fresh data in the future. I look forward to being able to share this information with you all in the future.

That's on the membership profiling that I have for you. Does anyone have any questions on this? If not, I will move on to IPv4 transfer. My colleague Guangliang Pan explained earlier a lot on suggesting those who have the need for IPv4 address space to submit pre-approval. So he's talked about that pre-approval. He also talked a lot about current account holders being able to transfer resources to each other. What I'm going to show you now is how we have implemented that in the system in MyAPNIC.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): George, just on the membership issue.

George Kuo: Yes.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): A few years back, we were accepting the membership fee or the resources fee in US dollars, and at that time when the US dollar was falling very drastically, APNIC has conveyed all the expenditures are being paid into Australian dollars and we should convert our fees into Australian dollars.

Am I right?

George Kuo: Yes.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): But now the situation has just changed, reverse. Now the Australian dollar is very strong comparing to US dollars.

George Kuo: Yes.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): Whether APNIC is thinking of reversing back?

George Kuo: Thank you for the question. I think that's a very good question, but I'm not in a position to be able to answer that question. I believe the fees are actually in the hands of APNIC EC. So perhaps I would like to suggest you to direct that question to them.

Rajesh Chharia (ISPAI): Should we raise this issue in the AMM or any other place if you suggest?

Maemura Akinori (APNIC EC): Let me try to respond to Rajesh's question. Yes, I think that's a valid comment, but I am not very sure for the necessity to reverse back to charging in US dollars. If we come to such a position, I will tell you. Thank you very much.

George Kuo: Yes. So let me try to show you what we have implemented in MyAPNIC to help APNIC account holders to be able to do the transfer.

What I'm going to show you now is the screen --

Brajesh Jain (Spectra ISP Networks): I have a small supplementary to the Chair EC. If not reverse to US dollars, you can give a reduction in Australian dollars, for the amount it was raised. Thank you.

George Kuo: Okay. On this slide, I would just like to point out, if you ever need any additional information on transfer, the URL there, /transfer has all the information to take you to various different parts, so I suggest you make a note of that URL.

This is the screen that a member would see when they log in to MyAPNIC under the resources tab, so there are a few forms there.

The first one, the transfer resource into another account, that's actually the form that has to be used by the source account. To be able to kick-start a transfer, the source has to actually take the step first to initiate the transfer by using the form.

As a result of submitting the form, all the relevant parties will be informed accordingly, meaning the corporate contact of the source account and the recipient account would also be notified.

What I want to mention here is once that is initiated, there is 30 days for the recipient to take action. Within this 30 days, the recipient can decide to accept the transfer or even decline or reject the transfer. If they decided to accept, then the form will take them to provide justification, why they need these resources and so on.

The other one, the second form is for the recipient, when they have been notified of the transfer, then it will go in there and then be able to complete the form accordingly that allows them to provide justification.

The third one is quite important. That's what Guangliang mentioned a few times, the pre-approval transfer. Basically, it is a form that's very similar to the resource request. All you need to do is, if you do want to know that what you need can be approved by APNIC, do use this form.

We don't have the time to go through all the steps, but I suggest to you if you do want to see how it works, please come to the lounge outside, you can see Tania or myself and we will be very happy to show you step by step.

With the pre-approval, I also wanted to mention that once you have received the pre-approval, you will be able to come back to MyAPNIC and look at the history.

So you will be able to see when the pre-approval was approved and it will be valid for 12 months, so you will be able to see the expiry date there and how much that has been approved.

Again, we recognise that while you are searching for the source of v4, we don't know how much time it's going to take you. Perhaps within six months, eight months, your need could change, so you would also be able to come back to this page and then resubmit the new pre-approval for evaluation. So that's something that I would like to make you aware of.

That's pretty much what I want to share with you on the support that we have built in for IPv4 transfer.

Just to wrap up my presentation, again, I think we can only deliver better service to you and the services that you need by hearing your feedback. So please do contact us whenever you have any comments or while here in Phnom Penh this week, please approach me and talk to me or any of APNIC staff.

Thank you.

Sunny Chendi: I believe we already heard a few comments or questions, so I'll go straight to the next speaker.

Thanks, George, for that presentation.

APPLAUSE

Sunny Chendi: The next one is Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service.

Byron Ellacott: Good afternoon, everyone. Over about the next 10 minutes, you'll hear a fair bit about this upcoming new service that APNIC will be providing which currently has the working title of WEIRDS.

So a bit of an overview of what you're going to hear. I'll give you just a bit of an idea of what WEIRDS is. I'll cover a little bit of background on Whois, so that we all understand what we're talking about. You'll hear about the major drivers for making this change. You'll hear about the current status of this work and you'll hear what's going to happen in the future on this.

As Sunny said, it is the Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service. It's quite a mouthful. It's the title of an IETF, which is the Internet Engineering Task Force, working group. The working group names do not always reflect the final product name and the final product name for this service will likely follow an ICANN taxonomy document which we'll share at a future date when that has been finalised.

In a nutshell, it is a web based simple access protocol for Whois data. I want to make it quite clear that what we are changing is the way that you access Whois data, not the actual data itself. So there is no work under way in this context to change what sort of information is in the registration database.

As I have said, it's undertaken in the IETF. There is a URL there that people who are interested can download this slide pack and go and read all of the current documents and drafts and all of the mailing list archives to find out exactly what is going on or of course you can come to APNIC meetings and I'll give you regular updates in these sessions.

This work was started by ARIN in their work on their RESTful Whois service, which is a web based service they are using. Again, there is a URL in the document here and you can go and take a look at what they are doing there. I think one of the most interesting parts about this is that since ARIN started running this service, this alternate access to Whois data, they have now managed to get 60 per cent of their queries through this service. So this is actually quite important stuff.

A little bit of background on Whois, just to get everyone on the same page on this. Whois was created in the 1980s for ARPANet. It's basically a way for people to know who has a particular resource, who is the contact information for a particular network resource.

It's used by domain name people. It's used by us in the number registries. It's a very important protocol on the Internet. A lot of people use it. It's one of the major technical services that APNIC provides.

The specification for the current Whois is extremely simple. In a nutshell, in essence, the entire specification can be simplified to six words, which are: ask a question, get an answer. It doesn't go into any details about what sorts of questions you can ask and it doesn't go into details about what sorts of answers you might get. That's all left to the imagination of the implementer.

Of course there are endless varieties of what sorts of questions you can ask and even just within the number registries space, where there are only five RIRs, there are five separate kinds of questions that you can ask.

But when you get to the domain name people, this is a much more complicated problem, because there are potentially thousands of TLDs coming up. There's hundreds already and ICANN is undertaking a process to introduce many, many more. It's endless variety of both questions and answers.

This is a problem for consumers of the data. It's actually very difficult at the moment to get a consistent understanding of who has a domain name or how to get the contact information for a number registration.

The major drivers for change are not just the consistency and queries and answers -- that's important, that's here -- but internationalization is also very important. Because that specification for the current Whois service is so simple, it doesn't talk about character sets at all. So this was fine back when there were a handful of people on the ARPNet and they all used US ASCII, but it's not really adequate these days. So internationalization support is very important for a lot of stakeholders in Whois registration data.

Consistency I have mentioned.

A referral mechanism is also very important.

A referral means that if you ask one person a question about a particular Internet resource, and they don't know the answer, they might know who does know the answer and they might be able to tell you where to go to find the right answer.

At the moment, there's no standard or specification or common way to do this. So it's a bit hit and miss whether you can actually get to the right place. So one of the goals of this work is to standardise referral.

Of course, authorisation and differentiation of service are things that are already done in Whois, but again in a variety of ways, with no clear avenue for people to know how to do this. We use authorisation in a number of places for providing differentiation of service to allow forfeiture of access if there are problems with an account.

We use differentiation of service. Some of the names people use differentiation of service in particular to rate limit your queries, depending on what sorts of things you are asking for. These are very important aspects of the Whois protocol.

The current status of this work. The RIRs have worked together to produce draft specifications for query and response on this service. We have submitted that into the IETF. There is a working group that's now looking at that and they are also looking at the names requirements. There is some great work coming out from CNNIC on the names requirements that is now being merged in with the numbers work to get hopefully a common standard. So there is collaboration going on with a lot of people to come up with this common standard.

There are pilot services running. Again, there's a URL there. That's a live service. It is a pilot service, so I do apologise if you encounter errors. Do let me know if you do. But you might well encounter errors. It is a very early pilot implementation. But you can go to that URL and you can take a look at the sorts of responses you get. You can see there that the question is really very simple. It's just asking for the IP information for that particular network range there.

Very simple, very easy to understand. The response is in JSON, which is the JavaScript Object Notation.

It's very easy for machines to read, but it's also very easy for humans to read if they have just a very loose understanding of JavaScript syntax. One of the goals of this work is to make this very easy for a PHP programmer to get done without having to do all sorts of complicated things. And port 43 Whois doesn't really address that problem.

There is participation in this working group process, by a very wide range of stakeholders, so we have the number registry people involved, we have the name registry people involved, we have people who do both, like CNNIC involved. We have ICANN involved, there are the lawyer type people and there are the registration data people, there are the taxonomy people, there's a lot of people out of ICANN involved and we have consumers of this data involved as well, which is really good.

I would encourage anyone in this room who has interest in accessing or providing Whois data to get involved as well. The IETF is an open process and anyone can participate and you can participate as simply as subscribing to the mailing list and providing your feedback. It's very easy to contribute there.

Where this is all going is to produce workable specifications for both name and number registries, and there are some aggressive timelines and milestones in the working group charter for this. The final specification for numbers I believe is scheduled for the middle of next year, which is getting rapidly closer.

I think it's very interesting and very high-speed work going on at the moment.

There are open questions right now about how authentication might work. This service is an http-based service and http gives us a lot of things for free. Referral is there for free and authentication is kind of there for free, because there's lots of ways to do authentication in http, but the trouble is there are lots of ways to do it, so there's an open question about how you might pick the best way or the set of ways or how to communicate which way you are doing it.

And bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is the problem that well, there may be a referral mechanism, you probably need to have some idea of roughly where to go to ask your question in the first place.

For the number registries, this is a relatively simple problem, because we all know and we like each other to a fair extent, I think, so if you ask one of us a question, we're quite happy to tell you which of the others you should go to for the right answer.

For the names people, there's a bit more complexity, because they have such a large problem space to work with there.

Of course, a major part of this is to implement production services and because there's such an aggressive timeline on the draft documents, we also have a fairly aggressive timeline on the implementation of production services and I hope to be standing here next year in the August meeting telling you that we have a service up and running, but I will give you a much firmer timeline and better commitments, or someone will in the next APNIC meeting.

At the moment, the work is limited in scope to just querying for a specific piece of information, so it's a look-up service that is being documented. The next step will be to expand it to a search service, which is going to be essential for this to be a real alternative to Whois.

In summary, this is an alternative protocol to access Whois data. It is not replacement of Whois, it's an alternative to the current Whois access protocol. It is not changing the data, it's just changing how you can query for the data.

It does solve a number of longstanding Whois issues and some of these issues have been thorns in people's sides for over a decade, possibly even two decades by now. So I'm really quite happy that we get this opportunity to try to resolve these issues at last.

It's a highly collaborative piece of work and, again, I do encourage anyone in the room who has an interest in this to participate. You're welcome to come and talk to me about this this week or send me email at this time and I'm happy to talk to you all about it.

It is at a fairly early stage but there are prototypes, APNIC is not the only RIR with a prototype.

You can find prototype services at various other RIRs.

Again, if you are interested, you can take a look at this stuff and you can actually start interacting with it now and get a feel for what it's going to do.

I'll take a couple of questions, if anyone is interested in asking anything at this point and if not, my contact details are up there. Please do get in touch with me, if you have questions, I'm happy to talk about this stuff.

Sunny Chendi: Just one comment or question. We are going into the lunch hour.

Heng Lu (Outside Heaven): Hi. Will that be a universal protocol for all five RIRs or is it just for APNIC?

Sunny Chendi: And your name, sorry?

Heng Lu (Outside Heaven): My name is Heng Lu from Outside Heaven, Netherlands.

Byron Ellacott: This is work that's being done collaboratively for all the RIRs. We will all most likely deliver this service. I can't actually speak for the other RIRs, but at the moment four of the RIRs have members of staff as authors on the documents, and the fifth is working with us on this.

So I think that there is intent at least to consider implementing this everywhere and I think that it's quite likely that this will happen across the RIRs.

Heng Lu (Outside Heaven): Do you have a plan to make a universal website so you can access all five databases at a single time, which we cannot do at this moment?

Byron Ellacott: If I understand your question, you're asking me if you could get access to all of the RIR data with a single entry point?

Heng Lu (Outside Heaven): Yes.

Byron Ellacott: The referral mechanism is intended to achieve that. If you ask APNIC about resource that's held at ARIN, what our server will do is re-direct you to ARIN server that will give you the answer straightaway.

Heng Lu (Outside Heaven): No, I'm thinking if you can input a single entry point in a ... website or IETF website, so people don't have to go to five websites to find relative information, which the IP belongs to.

Byron Ellacott: The answer from the floor is that it will be an http reader, so effectively whichever RIR server you go to, you will get the answer that you want. It's possible that we can do a round robin on an NRO server name, but it's quite early days for that. But thank you for the comment.

Sunny Chendi: Thank you, Byron, for that interesting presentation.

I would like to request Champika and please keep it short.

Champika Wijayatunga: Good morning all. I think I have very limited time. I'm standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to make it quick.

Basically, with this service update, I'm talking about the training activities at APNIC. So I'm Champika and I'm the training manager at APNIC.

Basically, you have heard during George's presentation as well, that our membership consists of quite a lot of industry segments, so to cater for the training demand for all those industrial segments, we have a number of training objectives: Basically, to expand the capabilities, knowledge and understanding of all the Internet operators, engineers, managers, educators, regulators and so on.

As you know, APNIC is distributing Internet resources to the Asia Pacific region, so we teach basically to tell the participants, the trainees to make the full use of Internet resources and to effectively apply those Internet technologies, techniques and so on in a best way.

Also, to teach the participants to proficiently understand, configure, manage and administer all the Internet services and infrastructures. So these are pretty much the main objectives of our training program.

What's our training philosophy? First of all, the accessibility. We think that there are quite a lot of participants, we have a great demand for training over the years, so there are quite a lot of participants coming from various economies in this region, so they should be able to easily access the training courses.

This is one of the main things that we need to consider.

Also, the availability factor. More training courses should be available for participants to attend.

In fact, probably you may know that we have a number of training courses that we offer, both in a face-to-face way as well as through eLearning courses, which I will go through later on.

The other thing is the continuity. Participants are able to update their skills and knowledge as the industry develops and their needs change.

Now we'll get to the face-to-face training delivery.

Of course we have been offering face-to-face training courses for many years now, but over the years the demand has grown quite a lot. So we have been offering quite a lot of face-to-face training courses and so these courses are conducted on site in various economies, in various locations, cities and so on and they are pretty much classroom based environments.

The fee structure, it is all subsidised, so the fee is based on non-profit.

There are two types of training courses we offer.

Face to face, one is what we call tutorials, so usually the tutorials are one to two days in length. Then we have workshops that are usually around three to five days in length. It depends on the training event.

Usually if it's a standalone training event, we have three days of training or workshops, whereas if it's in conjunction with an APNIC meeting or a kind of network operators group event like SANOG or PacNOG and so on, we tend to do five days of workshops, so it depends on the event.

Talking about the curriculum and the courses, we have quite a lot of training courses, all the way, you can go through this list, all the way from Internet resource management, one of our core training courses, Internet Routing Registry, in fact, we have offered these tutorials during this APNIC meeting as well, APNIC Conference; IPv6 workshops, in recent times we have been offering quite a lot of IPv6 workshops. Then we have routing, we focus on these routing protocols such as OSPF, BGP and we talk about the best practices.

Then domain name system, DNS, DNS security, DNSSEC and so on. Internet technologies, this one is kind of a more fundamental course. Then network security, where we focus mostly on the network infrastructure security side.

For more information, you can actually visit our website, the training website, where you will find more information about these courses and the content.

I also told you we have eLearning delivery, so this is actually through interactive web classes, where we try to provide more frequent training courses. Earlier, I mentioned to you that we try to provide more training to our community as much as possible, so one way of doing that is to offer through eLearning, because we can provide quite frequent courses and also participants don't need to travel, they can participate in these training courses from their offices and workstations and so on, regardless of geographical locations and also the time zone factor.

Since this year, since this April, we have increased the number of these eLearning courses on offer. Now we offer nine eLearning courses a month. Usually the first three Wednesdays of every month, we offer three courses on every Wednesday. Three Wednesdays every month and three courses on every Wednesday, so altogether nine courses on nine sessions per month.

You can see that there are three session timings.

This is to cater for across the Asia Pacific region, because as you know, it's a kind of big region, all the way, if you start from Afghanistan to Pacific Islands and so on, so it's a challenge to really cater for the whole area in in terms of time.

That's why we offer three sessions, so morning session, you can see that one is a morning session, and one is a midday session and the other one is an afternoon session.

These are all one-hour training sessions and if someone needs, they can start from the morning, they can follow it till the evening, so the topics have been organised in such a way that one can follow up all the sessions one after the other.

Also, in case if someone misses one session, they can easily attend the other missed session on an upcoming Wednesday, probably on a different -- which is catered for a different subregion.

These are catered for Pacific and Oceania, South-East Asia and then of course South Asia. These eLearning courses are offered at no charge.

There are quite a lot of eLearning web classes on offer. If you want to see the curriculum and so on, you can visit the website. In fact now we offer 18 eLearning courses. You can see all the way from Internet registry policies to requesting addresses to all the way more technical sessions as well and also most of these sessions obviously will focus on the registry related, the best practices guidelines and so on.

Then also in recent times we have been getting quite a lot of training demands, so we have come up with these tailored training courses. These are to cover the training requests of a particular training organizations, because we see some organizations want to send a lot of staff to all these training courses so they have a big demanding demand. So to such organizations we do offer training courses based on their demands, based on a modular structure and so the contents are all customized and offered based on the organization's request. Again, the business model here is a cost recovery business model, so the cost for the training will be borne by the training requestor. We have trialled this, we have done a pilot training session. It has been a success.

Also, we are planning to offer this post-training consultancy, which means if the trainees, the participants, if, after the training the organization, they want to be with the trainer, sit with the trainers and get more advice, more guidance and so on, there's a possibility they can request for such. Again, this is based on a cost recovery model as well. We haven't done this yet, but we are entering into a pilot mode now.

In this cost recovery model, what do we cover? Basically, the training requestor will need to cover the trainer's airfares and trainer's other costs like transportation, accommodation, the facilitation preparation, all these things. Basically, they will cover all the costs related to the training session and so on.

Here the thing is that since it's a cost recovery model, there won't be any sort of discounts, LDC discounts as such, because it's a cost recovery model.

Also, we have been doing quite a lot of training collaboration with many organizations, for example, with RIPE NCC we have been developing IPv6 workshop materials and NSRC has been also a greater supporter all these years, we have been working quite closely with them, we do joint workshops, mostly in network operators groups and so on.

Team Cymru is another organization that does provide trainer resources. We have done training collaboration activities together with them, mostly in the security training areas.

Also we have other regional training partners, we have worked with a number of them, basically specially things like translation of training materials and deliver training in local languages and so on.

We also have training resources. We have a physical lab. This is mainly for workshops. I earlier told you that there are different types of training deliveries, tutorials, workshops and so on. So the training, more hands-on type training is offered in workshops. We have a physical lab that is located in the Brisbane office.

Also, we have some virtual solutions. We have a virtual lab, because, for example, last year, when we used in one of the trainings the physical lab, probably you may heard that there were some floods in Brisbane, so at that time we could not really use the physical lab. So at that time we thought, okay, having kind of a virtual solution would be also quite beneficial. In fact now it gives us quite a lot of flexibility, having a virtual lab, that's running on MacMini servers, but it replicates our physical lab.

Also this will give us quite a lot of opportunities to do or run parallel workshops, because since we now have quite a lot of training events, a lot of activities, we do get requests or we do have requirements to run training workshops in parallel.

This will give us quite a lot of flexibility in terms of having one on a virtual lab and one on a physical lab.

We also don't depend totally on the access to the physical lab in this event. Also the other thing is sometimes when we go out and do training, in some of the remote locations, it's hard to get good connectivity connecting to the remote lab, in these situations also our virtual labs are quite helpful.

The physical lab, yes, we access remotely. The hardware, we have Cisco and Juniper at the moment, but of course we welcome if there are any other vendors who are keen to provide some more support for us, we are quite keen on that.

It also allows an available environment for quite a lot of test scenarios internally for us. For trainers as well as for our technical staff, we do internal testing and we use these resources. That will be of course included in our training material which will give us quite a lot of possibilities to enhance our training material.

We also have various lab topologies running on these labs. We have ISP topologies and also we have IXP topologies. Again, we discuss a number of best current practices related to what we do.

Training support services: finally, now, the training team, training unit, also supports these APNIC Conferences, with remote hubs happening. Probably you may know, even in conjunction with this meeting, we are having two remote hubs, one in Indonesia, in Medan, and one in Nepal, in Kathmandu. So they will be joining tomorrow actually during policy sessions, so the trainers do go there and facilitate these training sessions as well as these remote participation sessions.

That's also one of the activities that we have been doing and we continue to do.

Also, finally, outreach activities across the Asia Pacific region, especially with the liaison offices, as well as even with the IPv6 program, now we assist these other outreach activities that we do.

I think with that, I will conclude my presentation.

It was a bit of quick one, but if you have any questions, some I can answer now or we can probably take it off line during lunch break.

Sunny Chendi: Just one comment or comment if anyone has one.

No, I don't see anyone coming up to the microphone, so thank you, Champika, for that presentation.

I just have one housekeeping note. Tonight we have a networking dinner at Yi Sang Restaurant, Riverside.

We will be providing transport from the lobby level.

The first transport will leave at 6.40 pm. It's a tuk-tuk, so you can have a local transport to the restaurant.

There will be some dance performances and the delegates are invited to take part in the dance performances. At least I can think of one person who will join the dance performance at the start. But these are local cultural dances. The delegates are actually welcome to take part in the dances as well, if you wish to.

The last one, last transport will leave at 7.37 pm, because we have some sessions going on in the evening as well. So we'll wait for those delegates to join the networking events tonight.

Thank you very much for participating. Just a round of applause to my colleagues here, who did very well.

APPLAUSE

Sunny Chendi: We will go for lunch break and we will come back at 2 pm. We have two very good, interesting sessions on IPv6. So see you at 2 o'clock. Thank you.