Route Servers

MIX uses BIRD (Bird Internet Routing Deamon) running on Ubuntu LTS 18.04 for its route servers. BIRD is wisely used at the internet exchange for route server clusters and has been found to be reliable in production.

To use the service, you will need to configure a BGP peering session to below Internet address:

 Route Server 1Route Server 2
IPv4 AddressIPv6 AddressIPv4 AddressIPv6 Address
LAN 1 (Production)202.57.208.12001:deb:4000::1202.57.208.22001:deb:4000::2
LAN 2 (Testing)202.57.208.12001:deb:4000::1202.57.208.22001:deb:4000::2

Below are the sample Cisco IOS router configuration to peer with our router servers:

router bgp (your AS)
bgp deterministic-med
bgp log-neighbor-changes
no bgp enforce-first-as
no bgp default ipv4-unicast
neighbor MIX-RS-v4 peer-group
neighbor MIX-RS-v4 remote-as 37971
neighbor MIX-RS-v4 description MIX-RS-IPv4
neighbor MIX-RS-v6 peer-group
neighbor MIX-RS-v6 remote-as 37971
neighbor MIX-RS-v6 description MIX-RS-IPv6
neighbor 202.57.208.1 remote-as 37971
neighbor 202.57.208.1 peer-group MIX-RS-v4
neighbor 202.57.208.1 description RS1
neighbor 202.57.208.2 remote-as 37971
neighbor 202.57.208.2 peer-group MIX-RS-v4
neighbor 202.57.208.2 description RS2
neighbor 2002:deb:4000::1 remote-as 37971
neighbor 2002:deb:4000::1 peer-group  MIX-RS-v6
neighbor 2002:deb:4000::1 description RS1
neighbor 2002:deb:4000::2 remote-as 37971
neighbor 2002:deb:4000::2 peer-group MIX-RS-v6
neighbor 2002:deb:4000::2 description RS2
!
address-family ipv4
  neighbor 202.57.208.1 activate
  neighbor 202.57.208.2 activate
  neighbor MIX-RS-v4 send-community both
  neighbor MIX-RS-v4 next-hop-self
  neighbor MIX-RS-v4 remove-private-as
  neighbor MIX-RS-v4 maximum-prefix 10000
  exit-address-family
!
address-family ipv6
  neighbor 2002:deb:4000::1 activate
  neighbor 2002:deb:4000::2 activate
  neighbor MIX-RS-v6 send-community both
  neighbor MIX-RS-v6 next-hop-self
  neighbor MIX-RS-v6 remove-private-as
  neighbor MIX-RS-v6 maximum-prefix 1000
  exit-address-family
!

Looking Glass

You can find MIX’s looking glass for all route server.

Filtering Policy

MIX’s Route Server filtering policy is defined in the source code for IXP Manager on github. This is a summary of what it does.

  1. Drop small prefixes – longer than /24 for ipv4 and longer than /48 for ipv6.
  2. Drop all well-known martians and bogons.
  3. Ensure that there is at least 1 ASN and less than 64 ASNs in the AS path.
  4. Ensure that the peer AS is the same as the first AS in the AS path.
  5. Drop any prefix where the next-hop IP address is not the same as the peer IP address. This prevents prefix hijacking.
  6. Drop any prefix with a transit network ASN in the AS path.
  7. Ensure that origin AS is in set of ASNs from the client’s IRRDB AS-SET.
  8. If the prefix is evaluated as RPKI valid, accept.
  9. If the prefix is evaluated as RPKI invalid, drop.
  10. If the prefix is evaluated as RPKI unknown, revert to standard IRRDB prefix filtering.

RFC 1997 Pass-Through

RFC1997 defines some well-known communities including NO_EXPORT. MIX’s route servers do not interpret these well-known communities but passes them through.