Running Your Own AS: Direct Hetzner Peering, a Fourth Edge, and Bringing the Home LAN into the Fabric

Table of Contents Table of Contents At a Glance Architecture: Four Edges and a Home Router The Fourth Edge: ixbgp at iFog and FogIXP Why a Fourth Edge Network Configuration FRR Configuration PF: Stateless Transit, Stateful Control Plane Direct Peering with Hetzner The Path Before The Path Now What Hetzner Sees What This Buys in Practice Bringing the Home LAN into AS201379 The Gap in Parts 1-3 MikroTik Configuration The Core-Side Configuration Traffic Engineering: Steering DTAG via Vultr The Observation The Implementation The Effect Hub Hygiene: One IP for Traceroutes Downstream Sites: PI Addressing for Friends and Services Lessons Learned Conclusion References Part 1 set up a single FreeBSD BGP router with two upstream providers. Part 2 added a Vultr edge with native peering and tied both routers together with iBGP. Part 3 joined LocIX Düsseldorf with a dedicated third edge router. This is Part 4. A few months of operating a multi-PoP BGP network produces a shopping list. I wanted…