You can find all relevant technical information for Free IX Greece in this page. If you feel something is missing, contact us and we will respond. We may even add it here so the next person can benefit from that :)

Route Servers

We operate two Route Servers for the Peering LAN, under AS215405:

  • RS1
    • 195.60.80.1
    • 2001:7f8:116::3:496d:1
    • TI Sparkle Athens
  • RS2
    • 195.60.80.2
    • 2001:7f8:116::3:496d:2
    • Balkan Gate Thessaloniki

Upon joining and receiving an IPv6 and/or IPv4 assignment, your sessions will be configured with them from our side, and you can establish your BGP connection to them at any point. We recommend that you peer with both of them for increased redundancy, reliability, and performance.

Filters

We reject RPKI invalid prefixes and only allow ASNs and IPs within a member’s AS-SET. You can choose your AS-SET when you request a port, and you should contact us if you want this to be changed. By default, we use the minimum amount of IRR sources for this, which is usually just RIPE. If you want us to enable additional databases, such as RADB, ARIN, etc. please let us know. We support separate IPv6 and IPv4 AS-SETs, but this should usually be the same for most networks.

Each BGP session with the Route Servers has a prefix limit which is picked based on your PeeringDB entry. Please ensure that this is correct before joining, and keep it up to date. As a reminder, your Prefixes field in PeeringDB should be the desired prefix limit, and not the current amount of prefixes being announced.

The Free IX Greece Route Servers update their configuration every 30’, so any IRR or other changes you make may take some time to be applied. No restart is required for your session in most cases.

BGP Communities

We honor RFC1997 well-known communities, and in addition to them, we further support the following action communities from our members:

  • 215405:0:MemberASN
    • Do not announce this prefix to MemberASN
  • 215405:1:MemberASN
    • Announce this prefix to MemberASN (default)
  • 215405:0:0
    • Do not announce this prefix to any member
  • 215405:1:0
    • Announce this prefix to all members (default)

More specific instructions have precedence over less specific ones. For example, if a network desires to join the Route Servers and prevent advertisement of their prefixes to any member except 210312 and 8298, they should tag their routes with 215405:1:210312, 215405:1:8298, and finally 215405:0:0.

  • 215405:101:MemberASN
    • Prepend your ASN 1x to MemberASN
  • 215405:102:MemberASN
    • Prepend your ASN 2x to MemberASN
  • 215405:103:MemberASN
    • Prepend your ASN 3x to MemberASN
  • 215405:101:0
    • Prepend your ASN 1x to all members
  • 215405:102:0
    • Prepend your ASN 2x to all members
  • 215405:103:0
    • Prepend your ASN 3x to all members

Higher prepend amounts have precedence over lower, and they can’t be combined. For example, a route tagged with 215405:103:0 and 215405:102:0 will only get the member ASN prepended 3 times, and not 5.

More specific instructions have precedence over less specific ones. For example, a route tagged with 215405:101:210312 and 215405:103:0 will prepend your AS one time to member 210312 and 3 times to every other member.

MTU

All member ports have a fixed MTU of 1500. This value is not configurable.

Qualification

After a new member is connected to the platform, there is no immediate access to the Peering LAN. The port is placed in a qualification state while Free IX is monitoring it for misconfigured services and troublesome packets.

To verify connectivity, assign your device an IPv6 address of 2001:db8:116::XXXX:YYYY:Z/64 where XXXX:YYYY:Z are the last 64 bits of your assigned Peering LAN IPv6 address, and an IPv4 address of 192.0.2.X/24, where X is the last digit of your public IPv4. You should then be able to ping the two Route Servers in the following addresses:

  • RS1
    • 192.0.2.1
    • 2001:db8:116::1/64
  • RS2
    • 192.0.2.2
    • 2001:db8:116::2/64

If everything works, and your port is fine, we will ask you to switch to the Peering LAN IPv6 & IPv4 addresses, and we will move your connection to this network.

MAC Addresses

We allow only a single MAC Address behind any Free IX Greece physical port. This can be your default one, from your equipment, or a generated one that must be unique. You cannot use more than one MAC Address, or more than one device in the same port.

The only exception is during equipment changes, where you are allowed to use a second MAC Address, but this can only happen for a short amount of time.

If you violate this policy, your port will automatically shut down, and you will need to contact us to fix the issue.

Filtering

Free IX Greece applies the following two filters to all its member ports:

Layer 2

We only accept the following ethertypes: 0x86dd, 0x800, and 0x806. They are, respectively, IPv6, IPv4, and ARP. Sorry, no Wake-on-LAN over our LAN :)

Layer 3

We enforce BCP214 / RFC8327. That means when we perform maintenance in a switch or across the entire IXP, or when we have a partial outage degrading performance, we will block all TCP communication on port 179 with a destination IP within our Peering LAN. The goal of that is to terminate all BGP sessions of our members over the platform, and eventually drain the traffic. Only after the traffic has drained will we begin work on the equipment that can cause disruptions.

The benefit is that BGP has time to reroute all packets around Free IX Greece for the duration of the work and avoid any connectivity issues for your network.