Open Source at APNIC

By on 20 Jan 2015

Category: Tech matters

Tags: , , , ,

Blog home

At APNIC, we depend on Open Source Software for our operations: most of our servers are one of Centos, RedHat, or FreeBSD.  Our development work is done in Perl or Java, using mostly open libraries and tool chains. As the open source community is only a benefit to everyone as long as people contribute to it, over the years the APNIC technical team has released some work as open source. This post highlights some of our work.

WHOIS and registry

APNIC runs a modified version of RIPE NCC’s database software.  Both RIPE’s version and APNIC’s version are open source.  APNIC also has a test suite for RDAP (Registration Data access Protocol) conformance. With RDAP approaching standardisation this suite may be of help to future implementors.


Community and policy

The APNIC CONFER tool is open source as we start sharing this work with the other RIRs.  Piloted at APNIC 38, the CONFER tool will receive some enhancements for APRICOT 2015 – and is used internally for some secretariat processes.  There is also a technology demo of a version of CONFER that can be embedded in Adobe Connect, although this version has not been used.


Labs and research

The core measurement device for APNIC Labs is an end-client IPv6 measurement tool.  A JavaScript version which can provide website operators with a Google Analytics view of their own visitors’ IPv6 capabilities is available on the labs site as open source.  A partial implementation of the Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP, RFC 7016) is available on the APNIC-Labs github account; this server helps assess NAT capabilities of end-user devices.

The DNSSEC measurement work depends on fast signing of randomly generated values, and Ray Bellis has produced an evldns server to serve signed, unsigned, and invalidly signed wildcard zones on demand – many thanks to Ray!


Software development

The APNIC software team have contributed two Perl modules to the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN): one for automated testing of web pages and one for overriding constants.  And finally, if anyone is running the Apache Karaf OSGi container, and would like an APNIC logo on their console, we’ve got a solution for you.


It is likely that APNIC will increase the amount of open source work.  It provides us with a direct and well understood way to collaborate with other organisations and groups, including the other RIRs, groups working on shared open standards work such as RDAP, and any community members who are interested in how some of the technology at APNIC works.  This post has covered most of our open source projects, but there are a few others out there to be discovered!

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The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.

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