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Installation 08 Setting Up Your IXP

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Barry O'Donovan edited this page Sep 11, 2013 · 31 revisions

At this point, you should be able to log into your IXP Manager using the administrative user you defined in the fixtures.php file from the previous step.

You now need to start adding the nuts and bolts of your IXP into IXP Manager.

Schema Diagrams

Schema diagrams are available here. These may help with understanding the below.

Setting Up Your Physical Infrastructure

You can start by adding the following objects under the IXP ADMIN ACTIONS menu on the left.

  • Locations - data centres / points of presence of your IXP.
  • Cabinets - racks in these data centres.
  • Switches and switch ports - your peering switches. See [this page for details](Switch and Switch Port Management) and ensure you set your port types.

When adding switches, you'll have to enter an infrastructure. At INEX, we have two physically diverse infrastructures. If you only have one, enter 1. For more, just use increasing integers. You can also use these if your IXP has separate peering LANs in multiple cities for example.

  • Switch ports - the ports on your switches; ensure you set your switch port types correctly as data entered here is used by various backend systems such as MRTG.
  • VLANs - on our infrastructures, we have multiple peering LANs. For example, we have the primary peering LANs and then some specialised ones such as jumbo frame peering LAN and VoIP peering LAN. You will need to create at least one peering LAN here.
  • IP Addresses - add your ranges of IPv4 and v6 addresses to your peering LANs here.

You now need to describe your peering LANs - for now this this a manual step:

Network Info

There is a table in the database called ''networkinfo'' which describes the peering LAN. It is best to explain this by showing the true IPv4 and IPv6 entries for INEX's primary VoIP peering LAN:

mysql> select * from networkinfo where vlanid = 6\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
        id: 5
    vlanid: 6
  protocol: 4
   network: 194.88.241.0
   masklen: 26
rs1address: 194.88.241.8
rs2address: 194.88.241.9
   dnsfile: /opt/bind/zones/reverse-vlan-70-ipv4.include
*************************** 2. row ***************************
        id: 6
    vlanid: 6
  protocol: 6
   network: 2001:07F8:0018:70::
   masklen: 64
rs1address: 2001:7f8:18:70::8
rs2address: 2001:7f8:18:70::9
   dnsfile: /opt/bind/zones/reverse-vlan-70-ipv6.include
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

We're transitioning away from the above but for now you'll need to add these manually as we have no frontend on this table. Most of the above should be self-explanatory:

  • ''vlanid'' is the primary key from the ''vlan'' table;
  • protocol is either IPv4 or IPv6;
  • ''network'' is the network address;
  • ''masklen'' is the CIDR mask length;
  • ''rs[12]address'' is the address of the primary and secondary route servers;
  • ''dnsfile'' is used by a script to populate the inverse / rDNS entries for peering addresses.

See [this page](Network Information) for details on the new more flexible version of this table that we are transitioning to. Many backend scripts still rely on the old table.

Adding Customers, Contacts, Users and Ports

Backend Provisioning and Tasks

These are just some of the backend automatic provisioning / configuration tasks that the IXP Manager database provides:

Next Step

Please continue to Upgrading IXP Manager.

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