I’ve been editing and structuring the Wiki for the -IX for some time now (the name hasn’t been decided on yet), and it looks good.
We have people, we have hardware, we have transit and rack space. Now all we need is to get started, and we’ll be happily peering BGP4 again.
For those of you who don’t know what all this stuff is about, I’ll try to summarise it here:
The internet is as some may know, a network of networks. Each of those networks is privately owned by a corporation, university or a person. In order for all those network to communicate with eachother, you need something. That something is BGP ( Border Gateway Protocol ).
Basicly, BGP is the glue which holds the internet together, it tells networks where they can find other networks, and through which path those networks can be reached. Since every major telco and ISP is connected through more then one redundant links, it can also change the announcement from link 1 to link 2 if link 1 where to fail. Because of this, outages that cripple the entire internet are extremely rare.
Now, the grok-ix (or grok-net) project, is a collection of network enthousiasts, who want to play around with network technology. For this to happen, we need a virtual infrastructure (an internet exchange on steroids and then some) and some official routable IP space.