About BEE-IX & community rules
What this is, and why you'd bother
A lab on your desk shows you exactly what you configured in it. An exchange shows you something else: what your config does when the far end is a live network with its own filtering habits, its own operator and its own mistakes.
Technically, BEE-IX is an IPv6-only exchange with a route server on AS210925. What you can do with it:
- bring up a BGP session with the route server and see the full member table;
- watch your prefixes pass — or fail — IRR filtering, and find out exactly why;
- steer your own announcements with large communities: who gets them, who doesn't, where localpref drops;
- look yourself up in the Looking Glass and read your AS-path the way another network reads it.
Most people here fall into three groups: engineers who hold an ASN at work and want to take peering apart without a change window; homelab operators with their own prefix and AS; small networks working out what traffic exchange actually looks like before walking into a large IX.
Getting connected
You'll need your own ASN, an IPv6 prefix to announce, and to be up for bringing BGP up yourself.
- File a connection request with your ASN and the prefixes you intend to announce. Once it's approved you'll get an email link to set a portal password.
- You get a peering address and the route server session parameters.
- Check your IRR objects — without them nothing gets through the filter. Publish ROAs ahead of time: RPKI is on its way.
- Bring the session up and cross-check yourself in the Looking Glass.
Getting into the hive takes a link to it. Your own link costs nothing; if you don't have one, a VM is available to rent alongside the exchange (details in the legal status block below).
Failing safely
The route server filters everything on ingress. A prefix with no matching IRR object is not accepted. A per-session prefix limit cuts off an accidental full table before it becomes everyone's problem. RPKI validation is being rolled out right now — it will run alongside IRR shortly.
So the worst a bad config does here is fail to establish, or get your announcement quietly rejected. You cannot break someone else's network through BEE-IX — a route that isn't yours doesn't survive the filter in the first place.
All of it runs best-effort, which is simply what this kind of exchange is. Servers reboot, the configuration changes, and something that falls over at 03:00 may well wait until morning. It's a place to experiment, not transit to put production behind.
House rules
There are few of them, and each one protects members from each other:
- Announce only your own or authorised prefixes. That's the same rule that stops anyone announcing yours.
- Keep your IRR objects current. The filter reads them: let an object lapse and your routes vanish from the table with no warning. Worth publishing ROAs too — they'll matter as soon as RPKI is live.
- Don't flap on a shared route server. One session oscillating lands in everybody's table at once.
- Don't send traffic here you wouldn't accept yourself. Unlawful or malicious traffic, obviously, is out.
If something starts interfering with other people's peering, the session gets shut down temporarily and you get an email saying what happened. It comes back once it's fixed. That's not a penalty — it just keeps one config from holding the whole table hostage.
Questions and abuse reports go to support@bee-ix.net.
Legal status
BEE-IX is a voluntary, community-run non-profit peering exchange: it earns nothing, sells nothing, and is not a telecommunications operator — no communications services are provided here by anyone.
Participation is free. The route server, peering, large communities, IRR-based filtering and the Looking Glass are available to members at no cost; nobody pays anybody to be here. Everything is provided best-effort, with no SLA and no availability guarantees.
The one thing nearby that costs money is VPS rental from sole proprietor Roman Sartov (ФОП Сартов Роман Ігорович) under a public offer agreement. That is a separate commercial service: you can rent a VPS without BEE-IX, and take part in BEE-IX without a VPS. Neither is a condition of the other.