Internet Exchange Point

Rules & Requirements

This document contains LONAP's rules and regulations which members must follow. They should be read in conjunction with the Memorandum & Articles of Association which govern members' relationship with LONAP and are available to members on request.

Organisational Requirements

  • Members must publish their contact information to whom requests for peering at LONAP should be sent.
  • Members must subscribe at least one e-mail address to either members@lonap.net or announce@lonap.net mailing lists.
  • Members must not carry out any illegal activity through LONAP.
  • Members must not circulate correspondence on confidential LONAP mailing lists or any other LONAP confidential information to non-members.

Technical Requirements

  • Members must have an Autonomous System number registered with RIPE or other appropriate authority.
  • All networks announced at LONAP must be registered with RIPE or other appropriate authority.
  • Members must not proxy-arp on any peering VLANs.
  • Members must only respond to ARP requests for addresses which they have been assigned.
  • Members must only present one source mac-address on any one physical connection they are connected to LONAP via. (Aggregated LAG ports are considered to be one connection.)
  • Each member physical port (or LAG) must peer with the route collector on at least one of the public peering VLANs.
  • Each public peering VLAN active on each member port must have a peering with the route collector.
  • Members should announce the same set of routes to the collector that would be advertised to a regular peer across LONAP.
  • Members must ensure that their use of LONAP is not detrimental to the use made by other Members.
  • Members must not install 'sniffers' or similar devices in an attempt to monitor traffic passing through LONAP.
  • Cabling to LONAP racks will only be run by contractors approved by LONAP and always in accordance with the guidelines set by LONAP.

Technical port and traffic requirements

Layer 1

LONAP members must advise LONAP of devices in the path between the LONAP switch and the members Layer3 terminating device, for example media converters, or connections via third party ethernet providers (psuedowires).

Layer 2

All frames forwarded to a particular LONAP port from a member must have the same source mac-address. On no account should BPDUs be forwarded to a LONAP port.

Members must ensure their equipment is configured in such a way that a frame received from a LONAP port is never forwarded back to LONAP.

Member ports are configured as either single VLAN or multi VLAN ports.

  • Single VLAN ports
    • This is the default configuration
    • Port will be untagged (native) in VLAN 4
  • Multi VLAN ports
    • This is available on request, when participation in multiple VLANs is required.
    • Members must choose between having either:
      i) All VLANs, including VLAN 4, 802.1q tagged; or
      ii) VLAN 4 untagged, all other VLANs 802.1q tagged (ethertype 0x8100)
    • The member equipment must be capable of containing traffic sent to the member ports to only the VLANs the member is participating in; this excludes many Cisco desktop switches from being connected to multi-VLAN ports, as they have no way to contain VLAN 1 and VLAN 1002-1005 traffic.

The public peering VLANs and permitted ethertypes:

  • VLAN 4 - LONAP main peering LAN (5.57.80.0/22 & 2001:7F8:17::/64)
    • 0x0800 (IPv4) - must have a unicast destination mac
    • 0x0806 (ARP) - must only reply to ARP requests for their assigned IPs on the peering LAN
    • 0x86dd (IPv6)
  • VLAN 5 - LONAP multicast IPv4 peering LAN (195.35.120.0/24)
    • 0x0800 (IPv4) - must have a unicast or multicast destination mac
    • 0x0806 (ARP) - must only reply to ARP requests for their assigned IPs on the peering LAN

MAC addresses

LONAP has an assigned range of MAC addresses, so members can use a fixed address if they wish to override a physical interface's MAC address. This is completely optional, but could be useful to present a consistent MAC address to the exchange e.g. to avoid it changing if a router is replaced.

Should members wish to use a MAC address from the LONAP IAB assigned from the IEEE, the block is 0050.c246.6xyy. x is 4 for 5.57.80.n, 5 for 5.57.81.n, 6 for 5.57.82.n, and 7 for 5.57.83.n. yy is the hex representation of the last octet of the IP address. e.g. the IP address 5.57.82.250 would have a MAC address of 0050.c246.66fa

Simply enter the IPv4 address assigned to the router to determine which fixed MAC address to use:

MAC Address Calculator

Please enter your router's IPv4 address to calculate the assigned MAC address.