Portal

Getting Started

This page documents the steps to get started on our internet exchange. It provides technical information on how to activate your service on our ERA-IX.

1

Ordering your service

The very first step is to select your desired service from our available services and place an order. During this step you will provide both administrative and technical information required for service activation. We currently offer 10G-LR, 40G-LR4, 100G-LR4, 100G-IR media (and even BYO-transceiver).

2

Signing the contract

ERA-IX will set up an order form, which has to be signed to bind and proceed with the order.

3

Establishing physical connectivity

Once the legal information is cleared, we will send an email containing your IP address allocation and a Letter of Authorization. Using the information from this Letter of Authorization, you can order a patch to the provided demarcation. Once the patch is connected, media should come up immediately. If not, the patch may need a polarity (TX/RX) swap.

4

Configuring your router

Once the patch is in place, you can configure your router according to our port configuration standards, using the previously provided IP details. Please note that you will be in the testing VLAN first. Once you are done, you can contact us to check the configuration and be moved to the peering LAN. A quick overview:

  • Our peering LAN is set up with an L3 MTU of 1500 bytes.
  • All media must be forced to the correct speed (i.e. no auto negotiation).
  • No link-local protocols are enabled (such as LLDP, CDP, STP, flow-control).
  • Your interface does not send out any broad/multicast traffic except for valid ARP and ND (but not ND router advertisements).
  • Your interface only sends out packets with the following ethertypes: 0x0800 (IPv4), 0x0806 (ARP) 0x86DD (IPv6).
  • Your interface does not reply to any ARP request except your IPv4 address.
5

Joining the LAN

We will move you to the peering LAN. Prior to doing so, we will perform a few checks to ensure your configuration is valid. After that step, you will be added to our peering LAN. After this step, you can configure your BGP sessions with other members on the exchange.

Maintaining stability

Our roots lie in security, and we want our brands to reflect this, measures are in place to enforce this. Once your service is live, we will protect you, and our other members with at least the following measures:

  • 24/7 Automated network health monitoring.
  • MAC address enforcement.
  • ARP security.
  • IRR based route-filtering on our route-servers.
  • RPKI route origin validation (drop invalid policy).

Should you want to receive in all routes advertised to our route-server, we can provide this, along with tagging. We utilize BGP communities to tag routes based on their filtering status. By default, routes which are considered invalid will not be exported.

Lost?

Is this page providing more, or less information than you expected, are you looking for additional resources or help, please let us know by getting in touch, we will be glad to be of assistance.