Dear BIX Member,

Historically, BIX has separated peering vlans for IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, this is very unique and causes problems or difficulties to many providers. (Also the IX-F json export to peeringdb.com can't handle this correctly.)

We decided at our last general meeting to solve this problem, and move the BIX infrastructure to the common IXP model. We will migrate the IPv6 peering vlan into the IPv4 vlan. We can do this in many ways, but we decided to do it in a fast and easy way, which will cause some outage in the IPv6 peering traffic, but (un)fortunately the IPv6 traffic share is still very low at BIX.

We need Your action! All BIX members must re-configure the IPv6 interfaces within the same maintenance window: May 19, 0:00 - 6:00 CEST from Tuesday to Wednesday night!

Our planned maintenance steps:

- On May 19, 2021. 0:00 (CEST) we will shut down the IPv6 Route Server #1 (2001:7F8:35::5507:1) in current IPv6 peering vlan (VLAN ID: 11) and move the route server with the same IPv6 address to the IPv4 peering vlan (VLAN ID: 10)

- After You see the connectivity to Route Server #1 is lost, You can shut down Your IPv6 peerings and interface, move Your BIX IPv6 address to the IPv4 peering lan (VLAN ID: 10), and re-enable the IPv6 BGP. (The BGP should come up with the Route Server #1)

All BIX Members must do the above steps within the maintenance window!

- On May 19, 2021. 6:00 (CEST) we will shut down the Route Server #2 (2001:7F8:35::5507:2), and move it to the IPv4 VLAN.
- After the Route Server #2 move is completed, we will de-configure the LAN switching for the "old" IPv6 peering LAN (VLAN ID: 11).

The above plan will not affect the IPv4 peering traffic during this night time maintenance. If You need assistance during the maintenance window, please let us know.

After the above maintenance, You can decide to remove the tagged vlan 10 from Your BIX interface, and move to the untagged configuration, just send us an email and we can discuss a maintenance window for this re-configuration. (Which will cause a small outage in the peering traffic.) It is also possible to do this in the above maintenance time window, just let us know.

It would also be very useful for us, if You could send us an acknowledgment reply about the above maintenance works. 

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

BIX NOC