Packets, People, and Post-Quantum Coffee – Notes from a RIPE Newbie
After ten years, the RIPE community returned to Bucharest — a city that’s clearly spent the last decade delightfully upgrading its vibrant tech scene. With 485 participants onsite and another 180 online, RIPE 91 packed a full week of routing revelations, hallway debates, and social events that definitely qualified as heavy-duty networking.
FastNetMon was there in full force — us three team members on site taking notes, talking shop, and drinking way too much coffee. It was my first RIPE meeting, so I went in with equal parts curiosity and wide-eyed wonder. Spoiler: it did not disappoint. Here’s what went down.
Monday: Clouds, Keys, and the Joy of Jazz
RIPE 91 booted up on Monday, October 20th, with Mirjam Kühne’s trademark welcome and a burst of Romanian folk rhythms courtesy of our hosts at InterLAN-IX. Hans Petter Holen reminded us that he’d stood on this same stage ten years ago — a nostalgic reminder that while the Internet evolves, RIPE’s energy remains the same.
The opening plenary wasted no time. Yoshinobu Matsuzaki from IIJ led us into the mysterious world of IPv6 scanning, where the address space is so vast you need detective work to find hosts. DNS clues, TLS certificates, and a bit of patience go a long way. The takeaway? In IPv6, silence really is stealth.
Tom Strickx from Cloudflare then explored gNMI versus SNMP — old-school versus new-school network monitoring. SNMP may be the granddad of telemetry, but gNMI arrives encrypted, structured, and ready for modern data collection, if you can survive the documentation.
Next up, Dirk Doesburg from Radboud University and SIDN Labs brought some cryptographic heat with his proposal for post-quantum-ready RPKI. His hybrid migration strategy avoids painful “flag days” — a pragmatic roadmap for when quantum computing finally crashes the party.
The afternoon turned to BGP security. Lefteris Manassakis from Cisco revealed just how sneaky BGP prefix hijacks can be — including one incident targeting root DNS servers that lingered for more than a year. A good reminder that “trust but verify” is not just a proverb; it’s an operational survival tactic.
By evening, Monday had delivered what every operator loves: full buffers of knowledge and a mild sense of paranoia about unverified routes. Perfect start.
Tuesday: BGP FlowSpec and the FastNetMon + NLnet Labs Collab
Tuesday kicked off with plenaries focused on routing tools and measurement innovation. Luuk Hendriks from NLnet Labs opened with an introduction to Rotonda, their open-source routing analysis platform — a fitting stage for our big announcement: we’re teaming up with NLnet Labs to bring BGP FlowSpec and a host of other advanced capabilities to Rotonda. Together, we’re making routing analytics faster, smarter, and more actionable for operators worldwide.
The day’s talks covered plenty of ground. Radu Anghel from TU Delft toured the landscape of route collector projects, unpacking the pros and cons of each data source. Antonios Chariton from Cisco picked up where he left off at RIPE 90, continuing his hunt for BGP “zombie routes” — those undead entries haunting ASes due to update bugs — introducing the Stuck Route Observatory to track and tame them.
Branimir Rajtar from 5×9 Networks then demonstrated how his team squeezed 1.2 Tbps throughput from plain x86 gear, proving that software optimization can still outmuscle hardware if you know what knobs to twist.
Later, Geoff Huston from APNIC gave everyone an existential crisis with his “measurements in the dark” talk — showing how modern encryption is blinding traditional network telemetry. If you’ve ever wondered why your visibility graphs look emptier these days, Geoff’s your culprit.
Security and human-side discussions followed. Yury Zhauniarovich from TU Delft dissected long-lived public secrets, Thomas Daniels from DNS Belgium demonstrated real-time domain-abuse detection, and the Diversity & Inclusion session grounded the day with personal stories about empathy and leadership in tech.
Then came the official networking event, which quickly lived up to its name — morphing from handshakes to high-energy dance-floor diplomacy. BGP peering requests may or may not have been exchanged mid-chorus. Let’s call that dynamic route advertisement.
Wednesday: Scope Creep, Rusty Birds, and Airbeam Hospitality
By Wednesday, caffeine dependency was officially an operational necessity. The day opened with the Connect and Open Source working groups — where Leo Vegoda from PeeringDB, Stefano Servillo from Sapienza University, and Mike Blanche dissected IXPs, route-filtering vulnerabilities, and interconnection policy.
In the Open Source WG, Ondrej Zajicek from CZ.NIC used BIRD as a case study in the perils of scope creep, while Annika Hannig shared her beautifully nerdy three-year rewrite of Birdwatcher in Rust — a story equal parts code and courage.
The Routing WG picked up with Lisa Bruder, Moritz Müller, and Tim Bruijnzeels covering ASPA and MNRS+ compliance. James Bensley from Inter.link then peeled back the curtain on how transit providers sometimes tweak BGP origin attributes to win traffic, joking that it’s a “zero-sum game, but at least we’re transparent about it.”
The Cooperation WG and RIPE NCC Services WG closed the afternoon. Hans Petter Holen walked through the draft 2026 Activity Plan and Budget, while Antony Gollan, Eleonora Petridou, and Robert Kisteleki led a live poll on AI at the RIPE NCC — where the audience enthusiastically voted yes, then changed their mind 20 minutes later. Democracy in action.
As daylight faded, Airbeam hosted an unofficial dinner that became the night’s highlight — excellent food, relaxed company, and enough route-policy discussion to qualify as continuing professional education. Thanks, Airbeam — you kept the RIPE 91 crowd cheerful and very well fed.
Somewhere later that evening, the famous Whiskey BoF was said to be taking place — that mythical after-hours tradition where a small room, unlimited whiskey, and an indeterminate number of network engineers collide. As a first-timer, I was already far too tired to confirm its existence, but judging from the stories, it was smoky, peaty, and surprisingly well-peered.
Thursday: IPv6 Reality Checks and DNS Tea
Thursday arrived too early for anyone who danced the previous night, but the IPv6 Working Group was already awake. Dmitry Melnik gave the wake-up call: doing nothing about IPv6 costs more than doing something. Wilhelm Boeddinghaus and Jen Linkova reinforced the point with real-world deployments and Android updates that make IPv6 just a bit easier to love.
The Database WG finally said farewell to MD5 passwords (yes, some were still out there). Ed Shryane’s operational update drew cheers for “zero whois outages,” which is basically a mic-drop in registry terms.
Over in DNS land, Jim Reid’s Hyperlocal Roots talk and Ulrich Wisser’s timing deep-dives had the room buzzing. By the end, the co-chairs handed Willem Toorop a well-earned farewell gift: tea, of course. Because the DNS WG always has a bit of tea to spill.
The community plenary wrapped everything up with RIPE Chair transitions, strategy previews, and one last standing ovation for Niall O’Reilly. By the time the RIPE dinner and party rolled around, Bucharest was glowing. Between the laughter, good food, and the inevitable debates about whether ASPA should be mandatory, it was the perfect send-off to an incredible week.
Wrapping up RIPE 91: Bucharest, you beauty
RIPE 91 reevalled me why this community is special: it’s smart, funny, opinionated, and somehow still functional after four nights of social events. From our FlowSpec partnership with NLnet Labs to every conversation in the hallways, this was a week of true collaboration and connection — the kind that keeps the Internet alive and evolving.
One of our teammates is actually from Bucharest, so they had the home-field advantage, but for the rest of us the city was a revelation — warm people, late nights, and golden autumn light. We’re already hoping to be back soon.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat with us, share ideas, or share the dance floor. See you all at RIPE 92!
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