Send an email to helpdesk@evix.org.
At the moment, we do not charge for connection to EVIX. This is for a few reasons. One of our primary goals is to provide a low barrier to entry opportunity for hobbyists. Many of us can not afford the high fees that other exchanges, even those for hobbyists, charge. We can do this because all of our infrastructure and resources are donated, so we have few reoccurring fees. We are happy to accept donations to help us with that and with expanding our resources. At one point, we considered adding a nominal fee of about $1/yr, but we ended up deciding against it.
We also don't want to feel like our members are customers. Since most of us are students or are busy with our own jobs, we can't provide the same level of service as a company can. If we had a mandatory charge, then we would be more obligated to solve issues and work on improvements. This could be detrimental to our own lives. There are also some cases where we can't figure out how to solve something from our end. Since all of our members have slightly different setups, it is up to them to solve that kind of issue. We don't want to feel like we must be full support agents who must solve problems that are not on our end. Sometimes neither of us can figure it out, and it is just best for the member to disconnect than spend a considerable amount of time remotely debugging their configuration.
In the future, we would like to provide a way to make a reoccurring contribution to help us with our costs and development. Since this is a donation, we would not feel as obligated towards the previously mentioned issues. We could also stick to having no refunds, even in the case of an outage, since you would always be free to stop your contributions and still receive the same service.
At one point, we were accepting donations by PayPal. We are looking into overhauling the donation system, but this has not been done yet. For now, let us know by email if you wish to donate so we can help you out with that. We also greatly accept donations of hardware, software, rack space, transit, and sometimes VMs for new POPs if it is in an area where we have little presence. We would currently be open to a POP on the east coast of Canada or the USA, Asia, Africa, or South America. If you have another idea for a POP location or have another donation idea, send us an email and let us know.
The internet exchange switch is a fabric shared by all peers. Peers must avoid doing anything which might overload the fabric, misdirect traffic, or otherwise cause harm to any other peers. If a peer shows a willful disregard for others, they will be disconnected by the operators. Additionally, peers are requested to only send traffic to destinations advertised by BGP. Do not point default routes and do not point static routes to other operators.
Peers must maintain their connection to the IXP and allow ICMP Ping. Additionally, operators are required to maintain a peering session to the primary route server. Operators who do not keep their route server connection are automatically de-peered. If you do not wish to connect to the route servers, you can let us know so we can exempt you from our monitoring system. Note that this means that we can not send out our automated emails to let you know that your connection is down. While allowing ICMP Ping is technically optional, it is a critical debugging tool and disabling it will cause many issues.
To be specific, our policy is that if one or more of your route server connections is down, we will email you at most once a week. If all of your route server connections come back up, this will reset. Technically, we go off of the connection that has been down for the longest time, so if you flip-flopped between which route server you were connected to, then you may not receive the emails properly. After three weeks, we will not send any more emails. If all of your connections are down, and the connection that has been down for the longest has been down for four or more weeks, we will send a final email and remove your connection. These warnings are per-IP. So if you have two IPs, you will receive separate emails for each.
This means that in the general case, you will receive three warning emails, one per week. After the fourth week, you will receive one more email removing your connection. If you only have one connection down, then in general, you will receive three emails, once per week, then no more. While you won't be bothered anymore, this is still a precarious situation because if at any time after four weeks, all of your remaining route server connections go down, you will be immediately removed.
Suppose you have been removed but would like to join again. Please send us an email. This way, we can give you your old IPs back rather than allocating new ones.
We also do not tolerate harassment of any kind. This includes support messages, private messages to other members (if they tell us about it), and inappropriate network names. We will let you know if we find you to violate this rule before making an action. This includes derogatory statements towards women and minorities. EVIX is inclusive to everyone.
We reserve the right to remove anyone that breaks one of these rules. We will try to give you notice if that happens. I will note that this has never happened before, but I think it is important to state our stance just in case.
While not a rule, we request that peers register themselves with PeeringDB because visibility there will encourage other networks to join and bring more benefit to all.
Start by looking at our example configuration instructions. Your setup may be slightly different, so these instructions may not work for you, but these are what we have found the most success with. If you find that a different configuration works better for you or you would like to contribute with instructions for another operating system, please let us know!
If all else fails, open a ticket with us by emailing us. Since we are often very busy, it may be a while before we can get back to you. If possible, include as must information as you can so that we can solve the issue in as few emails as we can. It also helps if you try to solve the issue yourself and let us know what you tried. 90% of problems are solved by just restarting your BGP daemon a couple of times, so that's likely the first thing we would ask you to do.
Please fill out the peering request form on our contact page, and one of our staff will get in touch. There is more information on that page about the exact process.
See our locations list to find the closest virtual switch to you. If you need any help, please email us. You can also connect through a VPS in Vancouver or Fremont from Free Range Cloud or in Zurich or Frankfurt from iFog. Both of them have donated resources to us, so we fully endorse them. Their admins have also played a big part here at EVIX and have full access to our systems.
Yes! We have a public looking glass available at lg.evix.org, which shows all peering sessions on both the Fremont and Amsterdam route servers. Peers with broken sessions are listed at the bottom of the page. Often with an explanation of what the issue is.
Because EVIX is a virtual exchange, it has no true location. We have tunnel servers in Fremont, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Zurich, Frankfurt, and New Zealand. VMs are available in Fremont, Vancouver, and Frankfurt. Physical cross-connects are available at Hurricane Electric's Fremont 2 DC and Serverius DC1. It is also possible to get a VLAN or layer two transit to our Amsterdam (Serverius DC1), Zurich, and Frankfurt locations. If your servers are hosted in Europe, we would be happy to look into a direct connection this way.
Our volunteers are from around the world! Bryce and Chris are from the Vancouver area. Many of our volunteers are in the US (both west and east) and Europe. Some are from other locations as well. Maybe we will do a meetup someday!
So far, we have only received complaints from one very vocal member of the hobbyist BGP community. They claim to have received complaints from others, leaving them with the considerable hassle of explaining what we are and why they don't think anyone should be involved. They also refuse to work with anyone involved with us as a volunteer or member unless that member removes all connections to us. We understand that there are disagreements on whether we should exist, but I think this person's behaviour has been immature. Still, we do invite conversation about the merits and demerits of EVIX via email.
There is also a small but vocal group advocating against virtual exchanges in general, often complaining on mailing lists or GitHub issues. We are happy to discuss this with these people directly. Please reach out to us. We believe that there are good reasons for us to exist and would love to share.
If you would like to complain, please send us an email. If anyone complains about us to you (unsure why they wouldn't contact us directly), please send them our way. If we only have complaints from one person, it is challenging for us to make improvements.
EVIX has two types of peers, local and remote. Local peers have a Free Range Cloud (Fremont, Vancouver) or iFog (Zurich, Frankfurt) VPS and have requested a complimentary cross-connect to the EVIX switch. Some peers also connect via physical cross-connect or other custom methods at our Fremont and Amsterdam locations. We are happy to discuss alternate methods. Currently, all of our physical cross-connects are 1G copper, but we can support various types of fibre at 1G and 10G as well (though a 10G connection would be of little benefit over a 1G connection).
Remote peers use a Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol to connect to the EVIX switch without a physical presence. Supported tunnelling protocols are EoIP, OpenVPN, VXLAN and ZeroTier. Note that GRE and GRE-TAP are not supported and will never be due to ongoing issues. We are open to supporting other methods, however. All peers, local and remote, use BGP to exchange routing information with each other and the EVIX route servers.
Just about any OS that supports one of our tunnelling protocols and BGP would likely work on EVIX. We have officially tested and support Bird on Ubuntu Server and Debian, VyOS 1.18, and RouterOS 6. We can't provide the same level of support on other devices, but we are happy to try. If you use another OS and get it to work, please consider sending us your instructions so that we can add them to the example configuration.
Our IPv6 subnet is 2602:fed2:fff:ffff::/64 which has been donated by 10VPN Hosting, while
our IPv4 subnet is 206.81.104.0/24 and has been acquired directly from ARIN.
We have two route servers. Our Fremont route server has AS137933 and is at IPv4
206.81.104.1 and IPv6 2602:fed2:fff:ffff::1. Our Amsterdam route server has
AS209762 and is at IPv4 206.81.104.253 and IPv6 2602:fed2:fff:ffff::253.
Yes! Our route server currently tags routes received from each POP with a unique community depending on where the route originated. The presently supported communities are:
Additionally, RFC 1997 communities are supported.
EVIX currently operates two Route Servers, one with AS137933 and one with AS209762. No other services at available at this time. However, in future, we may turn up some new services. If you host any services on EVIX, such as NTP or DNS, let us know, and we can add you to this list.
While our standard MTU is 1500, there are some cases where this causes issues (and we are not sure why). So one solution to some problems that people have come across is to set your MTU to 1400. So if you can ping the route servers but not connect to them, try setting your MTU to 1400.
There are two ways that you can get a machine-readable list of our peers. The first is our IXP JSON that is standardized and used by a number of services already. You can also get our internal data which is more accurate to how we represent peers internally but may be less useful for standardized tools.
Yes! We do have a PeeringDB page.
We have a Twitter account but it is rarely used these days.
We do not have a mailing list at the moment, but it is on our todo list for the future. It would be a great way to disseminate critical information about changes to our system. We are thinking about using mailman, but if you know of better mailing list software, please let us know.
That's great! All of our coordination happens on
Discord, so be sure to join that first. Then send a message to the EVIX channel or
message me personally. My Discord user is Bryce#0873. I recommend looking over our GitHub repo first since it
contains many of our training instructions and general information about our system.
Many people ask us why we made a virtual exchange rather than make a free one in a datacenter similar to what FCIX does. The reason is that datacenters are expensive. When I (Bryce) first started EVIX, there was no way that I would be able to afford a full rack, even in the datacenter that FCIX is in, which is very cheap. FCIX requires a whole rack to join. In many other datacenters, cross-connects cost an additional monthly fee. The only way we would even be able to afford to start an IX in those situations would be sponsorships or donations. To continue, we would likely need to charge hefty fees on top of the already high costs to be in the datacenter. This means that the only way to support the large number of hobbyists who can not afford a full rack and may not even be able to afford a VPS is to start a virtual exchange. There are many criticisms of virtual exchanges in general, which are covered in the following few points.
I won't say that all virtual exchanges are justified. While I can't speak for our members, building EVIX has been a valuable experience for our admins. Many of those who disagree think that we should either join DN42 or build an exchange in our lab (not that many of our admins could afford a lab, remember that many of us are students). DN42 is a great way to get started with BGP, and we highly recommend it. Some things just can't be learned from a lab or DN42.
At EVIX, we have had to work as a team which is significantly more complex than working alone. We have also had to coordinate between many technologies. If you just built a lab, chances are that you would use the same OS for everything, or you would at least be limited to what you can think of. With EVIX, we have so many members asking for many different things that we would not have thought of on our own and now have to come up with. The large number of members has also necessitated automation that was not planned initially. As people count on us, there is a significant incentive to keep working on the project. Since it has been around for so long, we have built up tech debt which has required us to create new solutions for things that we have forgotten. Overall, the experience has been much closer to working at a company than building a project as a hobby. This has given us such invaluable experience that it was worth making EVIX for that reason alone.
We are thrilled to discuss this topic, so please reach out to us! I think that we can come up with compromises that make everyone happy.
Because we are composed of volunteers who pay for most resources out-of-pocket, we currently have no budget. If you would like to donate, please let us know, but otherwise, we likely can't afford your product. Also, internet exchanges don't need transit to our ASNs, so please don't try to sell us that.
Not yet! All of the colours on the website are temporary. If you have good colours for a dark mode, let
us know, and we will implement it. Our dark blue is #091540, light blue is #7692ff, even lighter blue is #ABD2FA, our accent color is #E60073, and our accent translucent color is #e6007377, which is only used for selected text. We use Fira Sans and Fira Code as our fonts by
the way.
Our logo is also temporary. It was made very quickly by taking our light blue colour and our accent colour and putting them in a blob. Then we added an animation when you hover over it. The logo isn't even an image. It's just an SVG underneath text. The gradient was inspired by the bisexual flag. Not for any reason other than that I like those colours. We will make a new one eventually, but this is like an in-6-to-12-months kind of later.
Many of our volunteers gain valuable team working, tech support, dev-ops, software development, and leadership skills. Email us to learn more about a specific person or more about what we do. I (Bryce) can also give you my personal contact information if you wish, or you can visit my website.
Send us an email and let us know! We are always happy to have some help! You can also submit an issue or pull request on GitHub.
Send us an email. I am sure that we can be of some help.