Saturday, June 20, 2026
[Transparency Report #010][OPERATIONS] BGP gets a Tune Up!
What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
What is happening?
This week’s changes focused on tightening routing policy between Edge, our
member access routers and the services router (Catos, Ikus and Nardoragon).
The goal was simple:
- eliminate any possibility of route leaks
- enforce strict prefix‑origination rules
- ensure the exchange remains hobbyist‑grade, stable, and predictable
All required changes were applied without service interruption. All member routes
remained visible and stable throughout the transition.
Changes to the exchange:
Our volunteers have implemented uniform BGP filtering across all internal routers.
Catos, Ikus, and Nardoragon:
- May only advertise their assigned /58 prefixes
- May only learn the default route from Edge
- Cannot advertise our PI /45 or /46 aggregate anywhere
- Cannot learn leaked routes from Edge or from each other
Edge:
- Only advertises ::/0 toward all downstream routers
- Only accepts each downstream router’s assigned /58
- Is the only router permitted to originate the /45 and /46 aggregates
- Will only originate those aggregates once we obtain our own ASN (maps already in place)
Prefix‑lists and route‑maps have been standardized across all routers to ensure the fabric
remains predictable and safe for our volunteers and members to continue learning and
experimenting within the exchange. This includes consistent permit/deny ordering, strict
prefix matching and hardened default‑deny behavior.
Are exchange operations affected?
Everything is operating as expected. This was much‑needed work in the background to ensure
long‑term stability and predictability of the exchange. These changes make our BGP setup more
oops‑proof, better hardened and more aligned with real IX operational practices — while still
keeping the environment friendly for hobbyist experimentation.
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
[Transparency Report #009][OPERATIONS] BGP Is Enabled! (Internally)
What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
What is happening?
This is a good thing for the exchange to have figured out. As of Jun 15th, we have learned
how to configure and enable BGP on OpnSense within the exchange. This means our techs
can now peer the exchange with member delegated /64s over /127 wireguard links! This is
a goal that we have been working towards, which also serves to get us moving towards our
goal of one day having a public ASN. Going forward, members who join the exchange will
have the option of having their /64 on-link or BGP peering with us an announcing their
/64 to our routing fabric.
Changes to the exchange:
- FurrIX Transit Fabric: Edge, Catos and Nardoragon are all peered using AS65300. Edge
announces a default route downstream, while the other two routers announce their assigned
/58s to the Edge.
- Exchange Member Peering: FurrIX has reserved AS65320 for peering with members of
our exchange, we also have started to rework our peering policies along with reserving
AS65400-65500 for member BGP sessions and AS65501-AS6550 for peering with other
hobbyist networks.
Changes Proposed:
Eventually FurrIX would like to add a BGP looking glass to our network that is peered
with the Edge that will should all ASNs and routes on the exchange, but this is a ways
off for the moment.
Are exchange operations affected?
Everything is operating normally, this was just quiet work in the background in order to
mature the exchange a little further and get to a point that we are reaching some of our
goals that were set for this year.
Thursday, June 11, 2026
[Transparency Report #008][OPERATIONS] OS Upgrades and House Keeping!
What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
What is happening?
FurrIX relies on a variety of open‑source operating systems and software projects that
work together to form the vIX. Periodically, our volunteers must perform housekeeping
tasks such as OS upgrades, NS zone updates and adjustments to routing and firewall
policies. Today marks the beginning of one such maintenance period focused on system
upgrades and lifecycle management.
What has been worked on so far:
- Core Router: Updated firewall rules to consolidate LIR‑range egress handling into a single
alias, reducing configuration duplication and improving maintainability
- Catos Access Router: Upgraded the OS due to end‑of‑life concerns and resolved an IPv6
routing issue affecting WireGuard interfaces
- Nardoragon Router: Upgraded the OS due to end‑of‑life concerns
Parts of the exchange still being worked on:
- Core Router: Pending OS upgrade to address EOL status
- Ikus vIX Access Router: Still offline and awaiting re‑deployment
- NMS: Monitoring is currently unavailable and requires full reconfiguration
- Status Page: Requires reconfiguration and an upgrade before it can be brought back online
Are exchange operations affected?
Yes — temporarily.
During house keeping, routing and service availability will be patchy as systems are updated
and rebooted. Once the work is complete, normal operations will resume as normal.
Monday, June 1, 2026
[Incident Report #035][DC] Power Failures
What Happened?
On June 1st at approximately 0145 EST, the FurrIX virtual exchange became unreachable. Shortly
after, our BGP announcements began withdrawing, causing our prefixes to disappear from upstream
looking glasses. Any members with devices tunneled into the exchange — phones, homelabs or
PCs — temporarily lost internet access and routing through the vIX.
We were seeing the following issues:
- vIX reachability — The virtual exchange was fully offline.
- NS1/NS2 Failure — Members could not reach either authoritative name server.
- Prefixes Left BGP — Our /48 and /44 announcements temporarily stopped.
- PHY One and Two power loss — Both hosts experienced unclean reboots.
- Backup failures — No backups were generated for June 1st.
What did we do to fix this?
We contacted the datacenter to determine the scope of the event and were informed
that WII were experiencing major power issues at the data center. Reviewing outage maps
for the region and weather reports, we became aware that severe thunderstorms passed
through the Kansas City area during the same time frame, which may have affected the
the region but we do not have concrete information on this right now.
As of this post, all FurrIX vIX services have recovered, our prefixes are visible in upstream
looking glasses again and member reachability has returned to normal.
Monday, May 25, 2026
[Transparency Report #007][OPERATIONS] Full Environment Rebuild Scheduled WIP
What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
What is happening?
The FurrIX vIX is currently going through its rebuild of our exchange and it is taking a little
longer than we expected. Due to a miscommunication, reinstalling the physical server’s OS
took a bit of time.
What has been reworked so far:
- Phy One: The ProxMox host has been rebuilt
- Core Router: We condensed our IPv6 edge and core router into one VM
- Nardoragon Router: Our services router is back online with new config
- Catos vIX Access Router: Has been pulled from backup and reconfigured
- NS1/Games-3P: These member facing services are back online
- Web Server: Our websites are back online
Parts of the exchange still being worked on:
- Mail-NG: the mail server has to be brought back online
- Ikus vIX Access Router: Secondary member facing router still being reconfig’d
- NMS: We currently have no monitoring, needs to be reconfigured
Are exchange operations affected?
Yes — temporarily.
During the rebuild window, routing and service availability will be null as systems are rebuilt
and renumbered. Once the work is complete, normal operations will resume with improved
stability, ease of expansion, better rooted upkeep and clarity.