Running Your Own AS: BGP on FreeBSD with FRR, GRE Tunnels, and Policy Routing
35 points by tomhukins
35 points by tomhukins
Posted the same thing over on the orange site, but If you'd like to experiment with running your own AS in private address space, connecting to a friendly network of geeks over wireguard tunnels, check out DN42 https://dn42.dev/Home.
It's a great way to explore routing technologies and safely experiment with your own AS, running the same protocols as the "real" Internet, just in private space.
If you do get set up, give me a shout (https://markround.com/dn42), I'd be happy to peer with you if you want to expand beyond the big "autopeer" networks :) Lots more peers at https://peerfinder.dn42.dev and there's all kinds of interesting experiments and projects run over DN42 space, and it has links to other interesting networks.
I am in the middle of registering my own AS with iFog and this post came at a perfect time!
I hope more people go down this path. The hobby ISP I co-founded started with some BGP tunnels before migrating to a physical rack and real fibre with Hurricane Internet. It's possible to build a highly available system without relying on Cloudflare to front everything for you.
I think the article would benefit from a costs breakdown, RIPE has recently started charging a yearly fee for AS registrations or IPv6 PA or something (unsure which). This ends up at around £100/year for merely the bureaucracy without any infra or transit.
To avoid the cost of running your own AS on the public Internet, you could take a similar approach on dn42 an overlay network running on top of the public Internet that allows network administrators to experiment with IPv4, IPv6, BGP, and AS numbers. One day I might get round to doing this, although I'm unlikely to do this on the public Internet, partly due to the cost.
Hey! Am also currently waiting for my ASN attribution :D