What it is like to have your own IPv6 and IPv4 space

Hey everyone,

As some of you know, I have my own IPv4 and IPv6 subnet, along with my own Autonomous System Number, in my case AS208751.

I am not a LIR (Local Internet Registry, you can read more about that here.) myself, so I had to get a sponsoring LIR to request my ASN. Once that was taken care off, I got myself a /44 IPv6 subnet, and a /24 IPv4 subnet.

As I am writing this, the RIPE NCC announced here that they ran out of IPv4 addresses, so I hope that the price that I pay for it does not get too high, otherwise I will have to let go of it.

It is an adventure, at least for me, to get it working. Especially BGP, as I had rarely worked with that before (I did in a GNS3 lab environment), but it’s different when you are peering with actual companies. (In my case, Hurricane Electric and Choopa LLC.)

Hurricane Electric provides a free BGP tunnel for IPv6, and Vultr provides a free dualstack BGP when you get a VPS with them.

I’ve managed to set it all up, and as you can see here, it’s all working!

I use frr on Ubuntu Server to set it up and it works fine. For encapsulation, I use a mix of GRE, as well as Foo over UDP with GRE in it. (The latter is thanks to a firmware bug in my ISP’s modem.)

Sometimes I watch the traffic, and see lots of ports being scanned. Especially from Shodan and Censys scanners. But also from AWS/Azure/GCP instances and servers in China and Russia.

Currently, I am trying to get it to work so I can use some IPs with NSX-T’s Tier 0 routers. This is something that I am still working on and will make a blog post later once I’m done working on that. (this idea worked and I have now abandoned it.)

That marks the end of this post, thank you for reading it and see you all for the next post.