Router

At our organization, we’ve been facing an issue with our FreeBSD Router running BIRD. Fortunately, our link to SIX has brought this problem to our attention. The router has been handling internal and external traffic without a hitch, but we’ve encountered an issue when the router itself needs to access the internet. In these situations, it’s using the wrong IP, resulting in increased latency.

We are actively working on a solution to rectify this problem, but we’re eager to hear from experts in the field who may have encountered similar issues. If you’re familiar with FreeBSD Router and BIRD, and think you can offer some valuable advice, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].

Yesterday, we completed the router migration! We transitioned from a router running Debian on a VM to a router running FreeBSD on a dedicated server. The new server features ten 10 Gbit ports, and we’ve set up MLAG on multiple interfaces to multiple switches for redundancy. With this upgrade, rylx was able to add another node to the VM cluster, enabling seamless VM migrations between nodes.

Additionally, we successfully established peering with the SIX route servers, as mentioned in our Seattle IX Update.

Well, it’s been almost two months since we first mentioned we would be joining SIX, but we’ve finally made some progress! Just to be clear, the delay was with us, not SIX; they have been fantastic. We are now officially a member, and we have the IP configured on our new router.

We’re still planning on moving to the router on 2024-12-21. We don’t yet have a plan on how to accomplish this with minimal downtime, but we’re working on it.

I’ve installed FreeBSD on the hardware and am working on it as time allows. I plan to switch from the VM router to the hardware router on the weekend of 2024-12-21. This timeline gives me enough time to complete the configuration and ensure everything works smoothly. I chose FreeBSD for its stability, but I want to confirm it’s the right choice before making the transition.

The remote hands at the data center installed the new NICs on Friday. I was hoping iDRAC would be configured with DHCP so it would get an IP, but that wasn’t the case. Fortunately, the remote hands updated the DHCP setting for me. After that, I was able to remote in and install FreeBSD.

Next, I need to set up some MLAG ports on the switch and prepare to migrate from the VM router to this router. I have OOB access to it, which will help prevent me from getting locked out since I manage the network remotely.