As most of you probably don’t follow the AFRINIC Resource Policy discussion mailing list, just to let you know there’s been some mention of the MIXP.

But it’s not necessarily easy to spot in the archives as it’s in between into a longer unrelated thread about IPv6 statistics.

If you’re interested, the mention of the MIXP is in these messages:

https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/2016/005894.html https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/2016/005898.html https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/2016/005899.html

What I mostly wanted to address was that there was mention of our IX being “down” and have a /22 of IPv4 space reserved, neither of which are I can assure are at all accurate or true.

Do note that the transit kindly donated by one of our participants was out for a short while, and that did affected *global* access to the web site. But as this is separate from the actual switch, the IX always keeps exchanging traffic!

But this allows me to remind everyone of a few thing:

- Don’t forget that the administrative and management services of the MIXP also *peer* at the IX! So in cases like this, if *your* ASN peers to the MIXP’s management ASN, you won’t see the outage. If you are reading this and are able to set up peering for your AS and don’t have a session to AS327821, please please get in touch with peering@mixp.org to configure.

- We have https://lg.mixp.org/ to showcase the participants ASN’s and the associated number of prefixes - but we need folks to peer to the route collector to show up here.

Having good data here is a way to attract possible future content providers!

And peering to the route collector does *not* cause any actual traffic to be exchanged with anyone - so is therefore zero risk and cannot affect your policies or business. But it helps the MIXP hugely! Please also contact peering@mixp.org asap to get this up.

- And don’t forget we also have live route-servers. (Sometimes called route-reflectors). These allow you to set up one single eBGP session and immediately exchange traffic with all others also talking to them. Much less work, but exponentially more traffic changed over time.

Anyone that is open to peering with the maximum of others and does’t yet have a session here is just lazy! Same contact to get connected: peering@mixp.org.

Again, we understand that not everyone has an open policy and so not everyone will find the RS useful. But please use the RC even if you don't operate an open peering policy.

Finally, as always, IXPs work most effectively when they're used by all participants. We encourage peering where practical across the public fabric as it is still a free-to-use IX.

All the best Daniel