Wednesday, July 1, 2026

[Transparency Report #012][Documentation] vIX Monitoring

What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.

What Happened
During the MFN to FurrIX migration, a number of larger infrastructure projects took priority
and were using our volunteer’s free time to get the exchange ready for full operation.
As a result, the monitoring stack (LibreNMS + graph export scripts) fell out of sync with the
new network layout. A stale firewall rule on PHY Two’s edge router blocked the monitoring
server’s requests with changes to new PI space, causing all transit graphs to stop updating.
Because this was a volunteer‑run transition with limited available time, the issue persisted
longer than usual, roughly four months, while other critical work was completed.

Changes to the exchange:
The outdated firewall rule was corrected, restoring connectivity between the web server
and LibreNMS. Once access was restored, all graph‑generation scripts came back online
and were patched with new tooling bits for extended monitoring internally and public
facing. All vIX flow‑rate graphs are now current and visible again.

Are exchange operations affected?
Both volunteers and members now have full visibility into how the vIX carries data and
how usage trends evolve over time. Aside from improved monitoring, normal operations
continue as expected.

Thursday, June 25, 2026

[Transparency Report #011][Documentation] Bringing our Status Pages Back

What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.

What is happening?
Our volunteers have been working the past few days on getting our status pages back
online so that our members can keep an eye on the exchange and get a heads up if
a service, router or endpoint goes down. This is being done as part of our transparency
towards the members that make up and run our exchange with us. While you won’t get
hard numbers from the Status Bot, it will give you a basic idea of the exchange’s health.

Changes to the exchange:
- status.furrix.zone has been brought back online
- addresses and checks have been updated to the new /44
- alerting rules will forward problems to our internal discord

Are exchange operations affected?
Nothing inside the exchange has been modified, this work is just bolt on monitoring for
peace of mind and is an augment to our upcoming LibreNMS deployment.

Thursday, June 11, 2026

[Transparency Report #008][OPERATIONS] OS Upgrades and House Keeping!

What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.

What is happening?
FurrIX relies on a variety of open‑source operating systems and software projects that
work together to form the vIX. Periodically, our volunteers must perform housekeeping
tasks such as OS upgrades, NS zone updates and adjustments to routing and firewall
policies. Today marks the beginning of one such maintenance period focused on system
upgrades and lifecycle management.

What has been worked on so far:
- Core Router: Updated firewall rules to consolidate LIR‑range egress handling into a single
alias, reducing configuration duplication and improving maintainability
- Catos Access Router: Upgraded the OS due to end‑of‑life concerns and resolved an IPv6
routing issue affecting WireGuard interfaces
- Nardoragon Router: Upgraded the OS due to end‑of‑life concerns

Parts of the exchange still being worked on:
- Core Router: Pending OS upgrade to address EOL status
- Ikus vIX Access Router: Still offline and awaiting re‑deployment
- NMS: Monitoring is currently unavailable and requires full reconfiguration
- Status Page: Requires reconfiguration and an upgrade before it can be brought back online

Are exchange operations affected?

Yes — temporarily.
During house keeping, routing and service availability will be patchy as systems are updated
and rebooted. Once the work is complete, normal operations will resume as normal.

Monday, June 1, 2026

[Incident Report #035][DC] Power Failures

What Happened?
On June 1st at approximately 0145 EST, the FurrIX virtual exchange became unreachable. Shortly
after, our BGP announcements began withdrawing, causing our prefixes to disappear from upstream
looking glasses. Any members with devices tunneled into the exchange — phones, homelabs or
PCs — temporarily lost internet access and routing through the vIX.

We were seeing the following issues:

  • vIX reachability — The virtual exchange was fully offline.
  • NS1/NS2 Failure — Members could not reach either authoritative name server.
  • Prefixes Left BGP — Our /48 and /44 announcements temporarily stopped.
  • PHY One and Two power loss — Both hosts experienced unclean reboots.
  • Backup failures — No backups were generated for June 1st.

What did we do to fix this?
We contacted the datacenter to determine the scope of the event and were informed
that WII were experiencing major power issues at the data center. Reviewing outage maps
for the region and weather reports, we became aware that severe thunderstorms passed
through the Kansas City area during the same time frame, which may have affected the
the region but we do not have concrete information on this right now.

As of this post, all FurrIX vIX services have recovered, our prefixes are visible in upstream
looking glasses again and member reachability has returned to normal.

Monday, May 25, 2026

[Transparency Report #007][OPERATIONS] Full Environment Rebuild Scheduled WIP

What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.

What is happening?
The FurrIX vIX is currently going through its rebuild of our exchange and it is taking a little
longer than we expected. Due to a miscommunication, reinstalling the physical server’s OS
took a bit of time.

What has been reworked so far:
- Phy One: The ProxMox host has been rebuilt
- Core Router: We condensed our IPv6 edge and core router into one VM
- Nardoragon Router: Our services router is back online with new config
- Catos vIX Access Router: Has been pulled from backup and reconfigured
- NS1/Games-3P: These member facing services are back online
- Web Server: Our websites are back online

Parts of the exchange still being worked on:
- Mail-NG: the mail server has to be brought back online
- Ikus vIX Access Router: Secondary member facing router still being reconfig’d
- NMS: We currently have no monitoring, needs to be reconfigured

Are exchange operations affected?

Yes — temporarily.
During the rebuild window, routing and service availability will be null as systems are rebuilt
and renumbered. Once the work is complete, normal operations will resume with improved
stability, ease of expansion, better rooted upkeep and clarity.