The birth of AS215855
For quite some time, I had been thinking of getting my self an ASN and a IPv6 prefix. One of the questions that I got stuck at almost every time was; where do I even start?
Finding a LIR
Since my purpose is purely for personal use and as a hobby/lab I had to find a sponsor who was willing to sponsor me with an ASN and a IPv6 prefix.
There are a few out there once you start searching for them. In my particular case I was looking for someone in the RIPE region because that's the easiest route to take. This comes with a caveat though if you're not a resident in the EU. RIPE resources are meant for Europe. Most of the LIR's help you out with this by simply letting you rent a VPS or similar from them, and therefor you can justify why you can get resources from RIPE. This applied to me since I live in the US, but I am a Swedish citizen.
After some Googling and researching I found Securebit who had everything I needed. ASN, IPv6 prefixes and a VPS I could rent to justify my RIPE resources.
The process
The process was quite straight forward. I applied for a 32bit ASN and a /44 IPv6 bundle. At the time of writing, the cost was a 60 CHF one time setup fee, and 15 CHF annually. There were some agreements that had to be signed but in a whole, it only took about 2 days before I had my ASN and my prefix.
Awesome! Now what? Where do we go from here?
Remember the VPS they want you to rent from them? They also provide you with BGP sessions for your VPS. (The VPS only costs 11 CFH/month).
The setup
So now we have a ASN, a prefix (a /44) and a VPS.
The smallest prefix you can/should advertise when it comes to IPv6 is a /48. So I carved out 2 x /48 from my /44 allocation and assigned one /48 in Europe and one in the US.
First let's talk about the setup in Europe:
The OS of choice for me is Debian and the routing software is Bird2.
With my BGP session now up and running, the path to two Tier1 ISP's looks like following:
Of course this isn't static in anyway. But a simplified view.
Now, I mentioned that the provider is in Europe and I'm in the US. This setup isn't sustainable for me sitting over here if I want to utilize my IPv6 range without adding the cross-Atlantic latency.
https://bgp.services/ is a great page where you can find VPS providers that will provide you with BGP sessions as well. For me sitting in the NYC area, finding a provider here wasn't that difficult. I went with Neptune networks and their smallest VPS. For $8 a month I get a VM with 1GB RAM, 2 TB data transfer and 1 vCPU. I went with Debian and Bird2 here as well and I have no problem with a full IPv6 routing table without the machine exploding.
So what I did here was basically the same as in Europe but with a different upstream
At home, I am also using a free service from https://bgptunnel.com/ which I am using as my secondary upstream.
IPAM
So now I have connectivity in both Europe and US. I carved out my IPv6 ranges and everything is fine. Right?
Something I've learnt is that IP-addressing in theory is simple, but in practice it becomes as mess if you don't keep track of your assignments.
So to keep track of all my assignments, I went with phpipam.
It has everything I need and it is easy to crave out new prefixes when needed.
Conclusion
Getting your self a IPv6 prefix and ASN isn't as difficult as you might think.
I even got my self a second /40 from August Internet that I have some plans to play around with as well.
Something that you probably gonna face, which is still a nightmare in the world of internet is the geolocation of your prefix. Even if you update everything you can, like maxmind, you have your geo-feed set, you probably gonna have issues for certain streaming services. ESPN still think I'm in Europe so my IoT network at home is a IPv4 network only.
Even though I am working as a Network engineer, I've never had the opportunity to work with internet resources like this and it have been so much fun and I've learnt a lot.
I also have my prefixes RPKI signed and I am also doing RPKI validation but that will be covered in another post.