Thursday, August 20, 2026
Incident Report #039: Backup Server Upgrade Fail
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
Our backup server had fallen significantly out of date across its software stack and during
an attempted upgrade. The update process broke roughly halfway through, leaving the system
in an unstable state and temporarily removing our ability to perform backups for the night.
Despite the failed upgrade, our volunteers successfully preserved all datastores before any data
loss could occur.
Upon assessing the severity of the failed upgrade, it became clear that attempting to salvage the
partially‑updated system would be too risky to FurrIX’s data. Our volunteers therefore used their
emergency governance override to authorize a full rebuild of the backup server. This decision allowed
us to move forward with a clean installation of the latest Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) version rather
than attempting to repair a heavily broken environment. Once the new PBS installation was in place,
the volunteers imported the preserved datastores and verified that the system could read all existing
backup data without any errors.
Points of Note
- Backups were unavailable for one night during the failure and rebuild window.
- No CT or VM backups appear to have been lost.
- All on‑hand data has been verified as readable on both PHYONE and PHYTWO.
- Normal backup operations have resumed under the rebuilt PBS environment.
The exchange avoided data loss and now has a fully updated and stable backup server. As always,
we appreciate the patience and understanding of our members and peers while we maintain and
improve the infrastructure that keeps FurrIX running.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Transparency Report #014: PHYTWO (Aedon) OS Hypervisor Upgrade Preparation
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
As a small team of volunteers, we pour a lot of free time into maintaining the network’s
engine PHYONE- which leaves our secondary server in need of a little TLC that has gotten
a bit long in the tooth.
Our PHYTWO server (Aedon) is overdue for major updates across its entire stack:
- Debian base OS
- Proxmox VE (PVE)
- Proxmox Backup Server (PBS)
These components are now far enough out of date that routine upgrades carry a
higher‑than‑normal risk of failure. To keep the exchange stable, we’re preparing for
both the best‑case and worst‑case outcomes.
Planned Work
We will be attempting a full upgrade of Aedon’s base OS and PVE environment. If everything
doesn’t explode on us, this will be a straightforward process and PHYTWO will return to service
with current software and no major changes. However, because this host is central to our
control‑plane and monitoring stack, we are staging for the possibility that the upgrade may fail
or leave the system in an unrecoverable state.
Pre‑Upgrade Safeguards
To protect the exchange and ensure continuity of essential services, we are taking the
following steps:
- Temporarily suspending NS2 service
NS2 will be offline during the upgrade window to avoid inconsistent state or partial failure scenarios.
- Backing up critical VMs to PHYONE
Any virtual machines required for day‑to‑day operation will be migrated or backed up to PHYONE.
This ensures we can continue running the vIX even if PHYTWO becomes unavailable.
- Preparing for a full rebuild
If the upgrade fails, we will rebuild PHYTWO from scratch, including its network configuration,
Proxmox environment, and PBS instance. This process may take time, but it will be done methodically
to avoid introducing instability into the fabric.
Expected Impact
- NS2 will be offline temporarily.
- Some internal tooling may experience brief interruptions.
- Limited member‑facing and peering services may be affected.
In the event of a failed upgrade, PHYTWO may remain offline for an extended rebuild period due
to our volunteers having outside pressures and commitments, but core vIX operations will continue
on PHYONE. We work on the exchange as time permits and in a method to avoid burnout of our
volunteers during this rather involved project.
Transparency Report #013 — Monitoring Anomalies and RRL Activity
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
On the afternoon of 18 August 2026, our monitoring system (LibreNMS) began displaying
abnormally large bandwidth spikes for NS2, including inbound and outbound traffic peaks
exceeding hundreds of megabits per second. These values were inconsistent with NS2’s
QoS limited capacity and did not match host‑level counters or resolver behavior.
During the same period, NS2 received a high‑volume PTR sweep from the IPv6 prefix
2a05:f480:2400::/48. Bind’s Response Rate Limiting (RRL) immediately escalated and
began dropping all responses to the prefix. This prevented any outbound meaningful
traffic spikes on the VM and kept resolver load stable.
A review of physical host metrics, VM‑level counters and RRL logs confirmed that
NS2 never transmitted the large volumes of traffic shown in LibreNMS or displayed on
our website graphs. The anomaly was isolated to the monitoring layer and one of our
volunteers pointed out to us that our LibreNMS VM is hitching, slow to respond and
sometimes timing out.
Changes to the Exchange
Our volunteers identified two issues within the monitoring stack:
- Interface Mapping Drift:
LibreNMS occasionally identifies the wrong interfaces for some of our VMs.
We’re currently investigating what is causing this and have an idea, but do
not want to point fingers until we are sure.
- Poller Delays:
The LibreNMS VM showed signs of slow polling and missed intervals. The
internal logs are showing both missed polls and ICMP issues within the
whole exchange, but our testing and probing shows otherwise.
We believe these issues caused the monitoring system to display incorrect bandwidth
values for NS2 and a few other VMs. No changes have been made to the resolver or network
at this time. Operations is preparing remediation options, including a rebuild of the NMS VM since
it still contains data from the project we split from, and will be presenting them to oversight
for consensus before proceeding.
Are Exchange Operations Affected?
No.
NS2 continued operating normally throughout the event. RRL successfully mitigated
the abusive PTR sweep, QoS remained effective and host‑level counters showed
stable, low traffic consistent with expected resolver behavior. The only affected
component was the monitoring system’s visibility layer. Member‑facing, peering and
internal services were not impacted.
Monday, August 3, 2026
Status Update
The routing stack across the exchange just got a fresh round of updates and a bit of
reconfiguration in response to the IR we posted earlier. Both name servers are now
running the same configuration, traffic shaping is in place where it actually matters
for the exchange, geoblocking has been added for the region where the bulk of the
attack traffic originated and the DNS rate‑limit profiles are now consistent across the
board. Everything within the exchange is back to normal day‑to‑day operation.
Among the changes:
- We’re now enforcing traffic shaping on the opnsense routers that interface
with the name servers, capping DNS networking at 15 Mbps.
- The RRL catch‑net for IPv6 has been widened from /56 to /48.
- The PHYTWO edge router (Groot) has finally been brought up to the latest firmware.
– This included converting older rules to the new UI.
- Not yet reflected in our policies: FurrIX will now retain NS logs for up to 48 hours
for debugging and network configuration work.
Hopefully this cleans up what we were dealing with over the past few days.
Sunday, August 2, 2026
[Incident Report #038][vIX] NS Abuse Impacting Exchange Stability
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?
During August 1st and August 2nd, 2026, the FurrIX vIX experienced a significant
service disruption caused by an unexpected surge of traffic hammering our name
servers. This traffic overwhelmed our exchange fabric, resulting in instability and
degraded performance for multiple services- up to the point of making the exchange
itself unreachable and completely saturated our link to our upstream.
During the events, we have been observing:
- vIX reachability issues — The virtual exchange entered a degraded state
due to excessive inbound NS load.
- NS1/NS2 saturation — Both name servers experienced heavy recursive query
pressure, exhausting logging capacity and reducing responsiveness.
- MA BGP instability — Member BGP sessions dropped from the vIX due to excessive traffic.
- Monitoring failures — NMS monitoring temporarily dropped during peak saturation.
- General service degradation — Web, email and auxiliary services were intermittently unreachable.
This event originated from external recursive DNS traffic and did not involve any FurrIX members.
Upon reviewing logs, traffic alerts and our periodic graphs, it was determined this may be automated
scanner traffic that found and exploited our infrastructure. Our volunteers are currently making
updated procedures and are in the process of updating the vIX configuration to deal with this.
What are we doing to fix this?
During investigation, it was determined that our existing rate‑limit configuration inside Proxmox
did not behave as we originally thought they would and thus did not protect the exchange fabric
from inbound saturation. Furthermore, the traffic that slapped the exchange was rotating through
IPv6 addresses at a rate and pattern that mostly avoided our BIND9 rate limits, which has been
eye opening in itself.
To address this, FurrIX is implementing the following corrective actions:
- Migrating all rate‑limiting from Proxmox to the OpnSense router VMs, where
shaping and policing can be applied correctly at the network demarcation.
- Reworking our NS policy, including tightening recursion rules, implementing
stricter query controls and improving protections for authoritative services.
- Enhancing network monitoring, adding visibility at the router, VM and hypervisor
layers to detect similar events earlier; including active alerting to our Discord.
Exchange operations may remain unstable while volunteers complete these changes and validate
the new configuration.
Current Status
As of this post, the exchange fabric has recovered and all core FurrIX vIX services are reachable.
Additional hardening work is ongoing and further updates will be posted once our volunteers have
completed all the ongoing work.