Peering Manager

The Peering Manager is a fantastic tool that allows your members to view and track their peerings with other IXP members. The display is broken into four tabs for each member:

• Potential Peers: Fellow IXP members that the member is neither peered with via route servers or bilaterally;
• Potential Bilateral Peers: Fellow route server members that could also be picked up for a direct bilateral peering should the member so desire;
• Peers: Fellow IXP members that the member is peered with via the route servers, bilaterally or both;
• Rejected / Ignored: The member can move members from any of the other tabs to this tab if they wish to ignore them, or if they have been refused peering with them. This allows them to keep their potential lists clean.

While not yet documented, the backend table for this is made up of detected and established TCP sessions between member peering IP addresses on port 179 and the list of route server members.

The features of the peering manager include:

• the ability to request peerings with a auto-generated peering request which is built up of all your own details as well as the other member's details (ASN, IP address, NOC details, etc);
• logging of peering requests sent (and which user sent them) in the peers notes file;
• logging of when the last peering request was sent and a warning if you try to send another;
• the ability to add custom notes against each peer with a clear indicator that those notes exist;
• the ability to manually move a peer to the Peers or Rejected / Ignored tabs.

Peering Manager Test Mode

For testing / experimentation purposes, you can enable a test mode below which, when enabled, will send all peering requests to the defined testemail.

NB: This does not apply to any BCC emails you add in a peering request. Also, the CC recipient in the request dialog will be ignored in test mode (defaulted to your own peering email address).

To enable test mode, just set the following in application.ini:

peeringmanager.testmode = true
peeringmanager.testemail = "[email protected]"

When test mode is enabled, there will be a clear alert displayed at the top of the peering manager page.

Normally, the peering manager adds a note to the peer's notes and sets a request last sent date when a peering request is sent. In test mode, this will not happen. If you want this to happen in test mode, set testnote and testdate to true. E.g.:

peeringmanager.testnote = true
peeringmanager.testdate = true