A small experimental/research network setup among the doldrums of the year twenty twenty-one. We will talk about why we set it up, the long and non-intuitive process that we needed to follow in order to set it up and all the various little bumps and potholes along the way.
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Why did we?
The short answer is ‘why not?’. The long answer is that in the absence of any socialising, or being able to visit friends and loved ones, we had a lot of extra time on our hands. With an interest in networking and, a desire to learn how a core part of one of the most ubiquitous technological dependencies worked, we decided to setup our own network and learn by doing.
Another element of this was the desire to have native IPv6 networking both at home and while mobile. Since neither our ISP nor mobile service provider are offering this service (or offer it in a manner that is unusable for advanced users), this is a nice benefit.
How though?
On this site we’ll publish a series of posts going into this in more detail so we’ll try and spare you some of the hard work of figuring it all out on your own. If you are interested in setting up a public network of your own you’ll need:
- A public Autonomous System Number (ASN)
- Globally routable IP space
- At least two (transit) peers
- A machine running BGP
What next?
At the present time, this remains a private network (though we operate an open peering policy) for our self learning. We are exploring the hosting of anycast services for radio amateurs, the provision of IPv6 tunnels and the possibility of setting up an Internet eXchange Point in the near future.