Running BGP with us
If you hold your own address space and your own AS number, you can speak BGP with us directly rather than having us announce on your behalf.
When you want this
Two situations. Either you are multi-homed and want to control how your traffic enters and leaves, or you are a network in your own right and announcing your space yourself is simply how you operate. If neither applies, having us announce your prefix is less work and gives the same reachability — see bring your own IP space.
What we need from you
- Your AS number
- The prefixes you will announce, and proof you hold them — a RIPE object, or a letter of authority for space held elsewhere
- A route object in a recognised registry for each prefix
- Valid RPKI ROAs for each prefix, with the correct origin AS and maximum length
- A NOC contact that a human answers
The route objects and ROAs are not bureaucracy for its own sake. We filter on them, and so does an increasing share of the internet; a prefix without them will be dropped by networks you have never heard of and you will spend a fortnight finding out why.
What we do on our side
We build a prefix filter from what you registered, apply a maximum-prefix limit agreed with you, and reject anything that fails RPKI origin validation. If you need to announce something new, update the registry and tell us — the filter is rebuilt from the registry, not from memory.
The limit is there to protect both of us. A misconfiguration that leaks a full table should bring down one session, not a network.
Session configuration worth getting right
- Authenticate the session. A TCP MD5 password is the minimum.
- Set a sensible maximum-prefix limit on your side too, so a mistake on either end is contained.
- Filter what you accept as well as what you send. Most leaks start with somebody accepting everything.
- Use BFD if you need fast failover. Plain BGP timers take tens of seconds to notice a dead neighbour, which is a long time if traffic is dropping.
- Reject bogons and your own space on inbound.
Influencing path selection
Outbound is entirely yours — local preference on your router decides which way traffic leaves. Inbound is a matter of persuasion rather than control: AS path prepending is the blunt instrument everyone reaches for, and communities are the precise one. Ask us for our community list if you want to steer announcements rather than prepend and hope.
Before you announce anything live
Bring the session up, check what you are receiving and what we are accepting, and
only then move traffic. Watch it with show bgp summary on your side and
tell us what you expect to see; comparing the two tables for five minutes at setup
prevents the kind of problem that is very hard to diagnose once real traffic depends
on it.
Open a ticket to start. A BGP session is set up by an engineer talking to an engineer, not by filling in a form.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base