The First Year of the RIPE NCC
Daniel Karrenberg
NCC Manager
<Daniel.Karrenberg@ripe.net>
Document IDs: ripe-92, COA(93)56
This report summarises the first year of RIPE NCC opera-
tions.
Achievements
The NCC started very quickly. Basic services have been
available from day one owing to excellent support of the
organisations who previously performed this work on a volun-
tary basis.
The NCC has set up the European Internet Registry which
assigns Internet numbers to European organisations. This
function is distributed to a number of local registries.
More than 10,000 IP network numbers have been assigned dur-
ing the first year.
The RIPE network management database has been maintained and
new functionality added. More than 500 database updates have
been processed by the NCC on an average working day.The NCC
also maintained general information for Internet service
providers and network operators in the RIPE document store.
All this information has been made available in various ways
including interactive access and the most modern Internet
resource discovery tools. More than 200,000 queries have
been processed during the first year.
The NCC has provided clerical support to RIPE working groups
and organised the RIPE meetings. Two urgent technical
development projects in the Internet area have been identi-
fied jointly by RIPE and RARE and were started under the
RARE Technical Program. The NCC provides a home for these
projects which are funded separately from the NCC core
activities.
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All NCC activities have been described in four public Quar-
terly Reports, issued immediately after each quarter, which
also provide a host of statistical information about the
European Internet. Please refer to these reports for a more
detailed description of the NCC's work.
The NCC has achieved the main goals set out in the NCC
activity plan. A technical review of the first year has been
initiated within RIPE and a positive report is expected
soon. Following that RIPE is expected to make the necessary
adjustments to the activity plan.
Operations
The NCC started operations at offices rented from NIKHEF in
April 1992 with the NCC manager Daniel Karrenberg. He was
joined in May by Anne Lord, network administrator and Marten
Terpstra, network engineer. The financial and legal adminis-
tration has been provided by the RARE secretariat.
As can be seen from the expenditure summary below, NCC ser-
vices have been provided within the total budget.
RIPE NCC Expenditure April `92-March `93
Item Budget ECU Actual ECU
Staff 140000 124865
Computing Equipment 45000 51396
Travel 20000 30996
Rent & Services 25000 22920
Unforeseen 5254 2278
Recruitment 8000 3699
Total 243254 235974
Summary
The RIPE NCC has established itself successfully and is
fully accepted by the European Internet community. Its ser-
vices are recognised as being essential for the Internet.
Outlook
The NCC will continue its present services in the next year.
Major new activities are going to be the establishment of a
routing registry and the housing of technical development
projects for the European Internet community one of which is
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the PRIDE project (Policy-base Routing Deployment and Imple-
mentation in Europe). The routing registry will enable
Internet service providers to register their own routing
policies and to find information about the routing policies
of other operators. Together with the appropriate tools this
will provide a means to achieve routing stability within the
European Internet. For more information see the PRIDE pro-
ject definition.