Connection and Joining Policy

The requirements mandated in this connection policy apply to every member of IX Liverpool.

IX Liverpool. is a mutual organisation working for the benefit of its members. As such, members must ensure that their use of IX Liverpool. is not detrimental to other members.

Any members adversely affecting the service IX Liverpool provides to the rest of the membership will be in breach of this Connection Policy.

Organisational Requirements

Members must have an Autonomous System (AS) Number registered with RIPE or other appropriate Regional Internet Registry (RIR) or working towards an application for one.

Members are required to :

• Be a recognised legal entity or incorporated association
• Only carry legal activity under English law through IX Liverpool
• Keep any correspondence from IX Liverpool confidential.
• Not publish information disclosed on IX Liverpool’ mailing lists without authorisation.

Members will provide IX Liverpool with any contact information required to allow the organisation to manage its services, including:

• an email and postal address where administrative requests can be made (i.e. notification of changes).
• an email and postal address where financial requests can be made (i.e. invoice issues).
• an email and postal address where commercial requests can be sent (i.e. potential leads).
• an email address other members should use for peering requests at IX Liverpool
• an email address where technical problems can be resolved (to be used by IX Liverpool to communicate technical issues).
• at least one phone number available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week where emergency issues can be escalated.
• optionally an email and postal address where commercial requests can be sent (i.e. potential leads).
• Traffic exchanged between two individual members is confidential, and subject to protection by the UK Data Protection Act 1998 (or any law superseding it). Members must not install ‘sniffers’ or similar devices in an attempt to monitor traffic. Any attempt to monitor traffic passing through IX Liverpool will result in an immediate termination of the member’s connection and expose the member to legal prosecution.

Members do not have to reply to peering requests sent to their organisation but must reply should IX Liverpool want to verify the address is being monitored.

Options

Members will be offered to join one, or multiple peering LAN(s), including :

• an IPv4/IPv6 unicast peering LAN with an MTU of 1500 bytes.When connecting with a tagged port, members must choose between having either:
• All VLANs 802.1q tagged.
• One VLAN (our IPv4/IPv6 1500 bytes MTU LAN) as untagged VLAN, other VLANs 802.1q tagged.

Hardware Requirements

Members must not in any way interfere with equipment and/or cabling owned by other members and installed at IX Liverpool without the explicit permission of the member who owns the equipment.

Members will not have physical access to any equipment located at IX Liverpool, including their own, without the prior agreement of IX Liverpool.

L1 Requirements

Members are required to connect using RJ45, or fiber connection as will be requested by IX Liverpool during the setup process.

Telecommunications equipment, eg: an NTU, may be housed in IX Liverpool colocation with the prior agreement of IX Liverpool. Any such equipment and/or cabling installed in IX Liverpool co-location must be clearly labelled as belonging to that Member. Cable labels must include the location where the cable ends.

Cabling toIX Liverpool racks will only be run by contractors approved by IX Liverpool and always in accordance with the guidelines set by IX Liverpool.

IX Liverpool requires its members to advise the organisation of any devices between the IX Liverpool switch(es) and the routers terminating the BGP session on the LAN. We expect members to inform us of any switch(es), media converter or third party providers used when connecting to LAN.

L2 Requirements

Members must ensure their equipment is configured in such a way that a frame received from an IX Liverpool port is never forwarded back to the exchange.

Only ethernet frames are allowed to be forwarded towards IX Liverpool switch(es).

All frames sent must have the same source MAC address.

Members equipment must respond to ARP requests for one MAC address only. IX Liverpool will filter traffic from unregistered MAC addresses.

No equipment connected to any Peering LAN is allowed to proxy-arp.

A member interface delivered over a link-aggregated port shall be treated as a single port.

In order to prevent any issues, no spanning-tree frames including Bridge Protocol Data Units (BPDU) should ever be sent to IX Liverpool.

Equipment connected to the LAN and trunking must be capable of containing traffic sent to the VLANs the member is participating in.

Any equipment unable to contain traffic within VLAN 1 and VLAN in the range 1002-1005 does not fulfil the requirement set out in this Connection Policy.

Member ports can be configured in access or trunk mode.

single VLAN – untagged (default configuration)

multi VLAN – tagged (on request)

The default VLAN for IPv4/IPv6 peering is 4.

L3 Requirements

Members must use the IP address and netmask per Peering VLAN provided by IX Liverpool and no others.

This IP address must be used to establish a BGP (version 4) session with IX Liverpool ‘route collector’.

The only L3 routing protocol allowed on any Peering LAN is BGP (as defined by RFC 4271 and later).

Each member’s physical port must peer with the route collector on at least one of the public peering VLANs.

All routes exchanged on the LAN(s) must be done using BGP (version 4), for the multicast VLAN PIM-SM and MSDP may also be run.

AS Numbers used on the peering LAN must not be from ranges reserved for private use, unless the router using this AS Number is not announcing any routes.

IP space used to number the LAN must not be advertised to other networks without written permission from IX Liverpool

All routes advertised across the Peering LAN(s) by members must point to the router advertising them unless otherwise agreed in writing by IX Liverpool and the members involved.

Members may use more than one AS Number for their IX Liverpool peering provided that each AS Number shares the same NOC and peering contact details.

Traffic shall not be routinely exchanged between two member interfaces connected to Peering LAN(s) and owned by the same member, unless otherwise agreed by IX Liverpool

Traffic shall be forwarded to a member’s equipment only after permission has been given by the receiving member, either by advertising a route via BGP, or in writing.

Definitions

‘peering LAN’ means Layer 2 domains to which members can connect their equipment in order to establish an ethernet connection and exchange ethernet frames.

‘route collector’ is equipment run by IX Liverpool to which every member will configure a BGP session and send any routes using BGP.

‘frame’ – as defined by IETF RFC 1042)

‘RJ45′ – as defined by ISO-8877

‘proxy-arp’ – as defined by RFC 1027

‘spanning-tree’ – as defined by IEEE 802.1D

‘VLAN’ – as defined by IEEE 802.1Q

‘trunk’, ‘trunking’ – as defined by IEEE 802.1Q

‘access’ – as defined by IEEE 802.1Q

‘MTU’ – as defined by RFC 791

To join, please email contact@ixliverpool.net