Rules


The North America-IX requires peering participants to follow the below set of rules to ensure the health of the exchange and other participants:

  1. Participants must use BGP-4 or its successor and must set NEXT_HOP_SELF if advertising routes from other North America-IX participants.
  2. Participants must not point default or otherwise use another participant’s or North America-IX’s resources without permission.
  3. There are only three (3) ethertypes allowed: 0x0800 (IPv4), 0x0806 (ARP) and 0x86dd (IPv6).
  4. Peering is bilateral, except for route servers [there is no Multi-Lateral Peering Agreement (MLPA)].
  5. The only non-unicast traffic allowed is broadcast ARP and multicast ICMPv6 Neighbor Discovery packets. Per-neighbor timeouts that result in flooded (broadcast/multicast) packets should be set to four (4) hours or as close to that as able in the case of vendor limitations. Short timeouts may result in a quarantine.
  6. Participants must not allow North American-IX subnets to propagate externally from their network and should minimize internal propagation as much as able. If a participant’s network beyond their North American-IX edge router(s) can reach the North American-IX subnet addresses, ACLs are requested in order to prevent this.
  7. Participant ACLs must not violate neighbor discovery norms, since doing so will result in excess flooded packets on the community fabric. For IPv4 this means that a participant’s router must be configured to receive and respond to ARP packets from all North American-IX participants, even those that are not direct peers. For IPv6, this means that participant routers must receive and respond to ICMPv6 neighbor solicitation packets from both fe80::/10 and all SIX participant addresses, including those that are not direct peers, directed toward fe80::/10, ff02::1:ff00:0/104, and the participant’s unicast North American-IX assignments.
  8. Participants may not sniff traffic between other participants.
  9. Participants must be responsive to other participants and North American-IX administrators to protect the exchange fabric. Urgent issues may result in suspension of a participant to protect the exchange. For non-urgent issues, if a participant is unresponsive to concerns raised by a North American-IX administrator, a North American-IX administrator will notify the non-responding participant via their PeeringDB and North American-IX contact emails if a response is needed to avoid suspension from the North American-IX. The length of time to determine if a participant is unresponsive and time to suspension will depend on the severity of the matter, in North American-IX’s sole determination.