Updates for 2021

June 21 (update #12)

New members:

  • Fastly
  • Opticonn

Since our last update in March:

  • The IRIDEOS (formerly Enter) MINAP POP is unable to accept new connections or upgrade the existing ones.
  • A new POP in an IRIDEOS data center has been sponsored by Mynet.
  • www.minap.it has been updated and converted to Bootstrap with help from Naquadria. The web site is generated with Template::Toolkit and as usual the source is published in our Github repository.
  • All the "MINAP updates" have been published on https://www.minap.it/news/.
  • The 100GE switches have been updated to IOS 16.12.5b in the hope that it would fix a bug which requires replugging the optics when changing the port configuration: it did not.
  • An AS112 instance has been connected to the route servers. Details of how it was created are documented in https://github.com/rfc1036/minap/tree/master/ansible/as112/.
  • The time zone of the IXP manager graphs has been changed from UTC to CET.
  • MINAP stopped providing BGP feeds to the Isolario project, which is being discontinued, and started contributing to Shadowserver.

TODO:

  • Implement RTT-based traffic engineering communities.
  • Migrate rs2 to BIRD 2 (probably before the summer).

March 10 (update #11)

New members:

  • Aruba
  • Level7

Members that left:

  • Qcom, acquired by a non-member

Since our last update in January:

  • The route servers can negotiate the BGP ADD-PATH feature.
  • The route servers impose the max-prefix limit configured by each member in PeeringDB.
  • Implemented support for the "never via route servers" PeeringDB flag. The check has been temporarily disabled for Hurricane Electric because it would reject too many of their routes: this needs to be investigated further.
  • The route servers configuration generator has been switched from bgpq3 to bgpq4. This appears to have fixed frequent timeouts.
  • The quarantine VLAN route servers have been upgraded to BIRD 2 and their reliability generally improved.
  • The members' routers are ICMP-monitored with Prometheus and blackbox_exporter.
  • Routes are tagged with the standard 43369:1003:$RTT community.

In progress:

  • Implementing RTT-based traffic engineering communities.

TODO:

  • Enable BFD on the RS (may require a future release of BIRD).
  • Migrate rs2 to BIRD 2 (probably after Debian 11 will be frozen).

Stalled:

  • We have a new design for www.minap.it, which still needs to be cleaned up and integrated.

January 27 (update #10)

The MINAP route servers recently received upgrades and many new features. Please remember that the route servers are documented in https://manager.minap.it/public-content/rs. A copy of the route servers configuration template is available from https://github.com/rfc1036/rpsltool/blob/master/examples/routeserver/minap-bird.tt2.

The redesign allows the route servers to safely accept more prefixes: we recommend that you configure max-prefix on the MINAP route servers BGP sessions to 90000 (IPv4) and 35000 (IPv6)

New members:

  • Level7 (pending)
  • Navigabene
  • Nexim Italia
  • Orakom
  • Terrecablate

Since our last update in September:

  • rs1 upgraded to Debian/testing and migrated to BIRD 2.
  • RPKI validation implemented on rs1.
  • Implemented route servers communities for selective prepending.
  • Redesigned the configuration of BIRD: this allows the looking glass to show which routes have been rejected and why.
  • Updated the peer locking AS numbers list, also with networks relevant in Italy (regional peer lock).
  • Plans for L2 blackholing support have been dropped due incomplete implementation of L2 ACLs by our Cisco switches.

In progress:

  • Implementing support for the "never via route servers" flag.
  • Implementing latency-based traffic engineering communities.
  • Implementing dynamic max-prefix.

TODO:

  • Migrate rs2 to BIRD 2 (probably after Debian 11 will have been frozen).

Stalled:

  • We have a new design for www.minap.it, which still needs to be cleaned up and integrated.