Good day and welcome to our first development update, #1. In these updates we are going to showcase new technical features and improvements at ERA-IX. In this particular update we are going to talk about our new integration into the portal, configuration availability, member 2 member statistics and finally BGP communities.
Portal Integration
We have developed an integration for our existing portal, in order to manage your membership. In this overview below you can see the current status of your membership, including financial related info and a quick insight in current traffic usage. On the left side of the page you are able to navigate through pages, for your convenience we have added some useful external links too, like our PeeringDB, Policy, Global Statistics and Member List.
Configuration
Being a NOC engineer can be a stressful job, networks are fluid and require active maintenance in order to grow or even be stable. Wouldn't it be cool to simply configure your port through the portal? So, no need to contact our NOC to make changes on your port? In the screenshot below you can see the most relevant technical information about your port and membership.
Let's try to change something by clicking "Change":
A new pop up will show up with the most requested changes (in our experience). Changing your MAC address or PTR on the fly. We have also worked on Filtering Policies in our IXP, we support the following modes:
Once your changes are done, simply click Update. While this is something we have automated, we still manually approve such drastic changes, so a ticket will automatically be created in our portal under your account. Then, an ERA-IX NOC engineer will review your changes and apply them.
Member 2 Member Statistics
This is one of the most anticipated features, using these statistics it's very easy to see how much traffic you are doing with other members on ERA-IX. See the Top 10 ASNs below:
The values shown in this table are the most actual traffic statistics. In case you want to see more from a historic perspective you can generate a Graph by a simple click on a button:
BGP Communities
What is an IXP without BGP communities? Our colleagues over at Cisco perfectly described communities:
BGP communities provide additional capability for tagging routes and for modifying BGP routing policy on upstream and downstream routers. BGP communities can be appended, removed, or modified selectively on each attribute as the route travels from router to router.
BGP communities are an optional transitive BGP attribute that can traverse from autonomous system to autonomous system. A BGP community is a 32-bit number that can be included with a route. A BGP community can be displayed as a full 32-bit number (0-4,294,967,295) or as two 16-bit numbers (0-65535):(0-65535) commonly referred to as new-format.
We have published our BGP communities on our website here.
Thank you for reading and see you in #2.
