Running Your Own AS: BGP on FreeBSD with FRR, GRE Tunnels, and Policy Routing
Running your own Autonomous System on the public internet sounds like something reserved for ISPs and large enterprises. It’s not. With sponsoring LIRs making AS numbers and IPv6 prefixes accessible to individuals, and FreeBSD providing the routing tools to make it work, you can announce your own address space to the Default-Free Zone from a single virtual machine. This article walks through the complete setup: obtaining resources from RIPE via a sponsoring LIR, configuring a FreeBSD BGP router with FRR, building GRE/GIF tunnels to distribute prefixes to remote servers, and solving the routing challenge that arises when a server needs to speak from two different IPv6 address spaces simultaneously. Note on addresses: All provider-assigned IP addresses, hostnames, and management…