Wednesday, July 1, 2026
[Transparency Report #012][Documentation] vIX Monitoring
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 Happened
During the MFN to FurrIX migration, a number of larger infrastructure projects took priority
and were using our volunteer’s free time to get the exchange ready for full operation.
As a result, the monitoring stack (LibreNMS + graph export scripts) fell out of sync with the
new network layout. A stale firewall rule on PHY Two’s edge router blocked the monitoring
server’s requests with changes to new PI space, causing all transit graphs to stop updating.
Because this was a volunteer‑run transition with limited available time, the issue persisted
longer than usual, roughly four months, while other critical work was completed.
Changes to the exchange:
The outdated firewall rule was corrected, restoring connectivity between the web server
and LibreNMS. Once access was restored, all graph‑generation scripts came back online
and were patched with new tooling bits for extended monitoring internally and public
facing. All vIX flow‑rate graphs are now current and visible again.
Are exchange operations affected?
Both volunteers and members now have full visibility into how the vIX carries data and
how usage trends evolve over time. Aside from improved monitoring, normal operations
continue as expected.
Monday, June 1, 2026
[Incident Report #035][DC] Power Failures
What are Incident Response Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. During the normal
operations of the exchange, our network and its supporting systems may encounter
operational defects, bugs, failed changes or attacks on our infrastructure. When this
happens, the FurrIX volunteers publish an incident response report to ensure all members
and peers remain informed as to what happened, how it went down and what we did to
recover or resolve the issue. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep communication clear,
accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
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.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
[Incident Report #034][DNS] Inter‑subnet Communication Failure
What Happened?
On May 15th, our upstream data center completed a router upgrade. As an
unintended side effect, the FurrIX subnets located within the data center
were no longer able to reach one another. Because this issue was isolated to
internal data‑center paths, no external member traffic or internet‑facing name server
traffic were affected.
The issue went undetected until May 19th because our monitoring system and
our email system reside on opposite subnets. With inter‑subnet communication
broken, monitoring alerts could not reach us.
We were seeing the following issues:
- Internal service reachability — Some internal services were unreachable from
member connections. - NS2 isolation — Members could not reach NS2.
- Stale zones on NS2 — NS2 could not reach NS1; as a result, its zones
went stale on May 17th. - NMS visibility loss — The Network Management System could not reach devices
on PHY One for accounting and monitoring. - Backup failures — PHY One could not reach the PBS instance on PHY Two,
preventing nightly backups.
What did we do to fix this?
We provided the data center with test results and trace data confirming the inter‑subnet
routing failure. They corrected the configuration on their side, restoring full communication
between PHY One and PHY Two. All internal services, monitoring and backup operations
have returned to normal.
Saturday, April 18, 2026
[Incident Report #032][DNS] SSL Expiry on NS1 and NS2
What Happened?
Our SSL certs for NS1 and NS2 expired earlier today. Currently our process
for handling the updating of SSL certs is not automated and requires our
team to manually install new certs and then reload the servers one after
the other. Usually this is on our internal calendar and is handled three to
four days before EOL. That didn’t happen this time.
We were seeing the following issues:
- Loss of DNS over HTTPS support
- Loss of DNS over TLS support
What did we do to fix this?
- We pulled new certs and updated the cert store
- We reloaded both name servers to restore service
Everything should be operational and peachy again!