Sunday, August 2, 2026
[Incident Report #038][vIX] NS Abuse Impacting Exchange Stability
What are Incident Response Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. During the normal
operations of the exchange, our network and its supporting systems may encounter
operational defects, bugs, failed changes or attacks on our infrastructure. When this
happens, the FurrIX volunteers publish an incident response report to ensure all members
and peers remain informed as to what happened, how it went down and what we did to
recover or resolve the issue. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep communication clear,
accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
What Happened?
During August 1st and August 2nd, 2026, the FurrIX vIX experienced a significant
service disruption caused by an unexpected surge of traffic hammering our name
servers. This traffic overwhelmed our exchange fabric, resulting in instability and
degraded performance for multiple services- up to the point of making the exchange
itself unreachable and completely saturated our link to our upstream.
During the events, we have been observing:
- vIX reachability issues — The virtual exchange entered a degraded state
due to excessive inbound NS load.
- NS1/NS2 saturation — Both name servers experienced heavy recursive query
pressure, exhausting logging capacity and reducing responsiveness.
- MA BGP instability — Member BGP sessions dropped from the vIX due to excessive traffic.
- Monitoring failures — NMS monitoring temporarily dropped during peak saturation.
- General service degradation — Web, email and auxiliary services were intermittently unreachable.
This event originated from external recursive DNS traffic and did not involve any FurrIX members.
Upon reviewing logs, traffic alerts and our periodic graphs, it was determined this may be automated
scanner traffic that found and exploited our infrastructure. Our volunteers are currently making
updated procedures and are in the process of updating the vIX configuration to deal with this.
What are we doing to fix this?
During investigation, it was determined that our existing rate‑limit configuration inside Proxmox
did not behave as we originally thought they would and thus did not protect the exchange fabric
from inbound saturation. Furthermore, the traffic that slapped the exchange was rotating through
IPv6 addresses at a rate and pattern that mostly avoided our BIND9 rate limits, which has been
eye opening in itself.
To address this, FurrIX is implementing the following corrective actions:
- Migrating all rate‑limiting from Proxmox to the OpnSense router VMs, where
shaping and policing can be applied correctly at the network demarcation.
- Reworking our NS policy, including tightening recursion rules, implementing
stricter query controls and improving protections for authoritative services.
- Enhancing network monitoring, adding visibility at the router, VM and hypervisor
layers to detect similar events earlier; including active alerting to our Discord.
Exchange operations may remain unstable while volunteers complete these changes and validate
the new configuration.
Current Status
As of this post, the exchange fabric has recovered and all core FurrIX vIX services are reachable.
Additional hardening work is ongoing and further updates will be posted once our volunteers have
completed all the ongoing work.
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.
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
[Transparency Report #009][OPERATIONS] BGP Is Enabled! (Internally)
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?
This is a good thing for the exchange to have figured out. As of Jun 15th, we have learned
how to configure and enable BGP on OpnSense within the exchange. This means our techs
can now peer the exchange with member delegated /64s over /127 wireguard links! This is
a goal that we have been working towards, which also serves to get us moving towards our
goal of one day having a public ASN. Going forward, members who join the exchange will
have the option of having their /64 on-link or BGP peering with us an announcing their
/64 to our routing fabric.
Changes to the exchange:
- FurrIX Transit Fabric: Edge, Catos and Nardoragon are all peered using AS65300. Edge
announces a default route downstream, while the other two routers announce their assigned
/58s to the Edge.
- Exchange Member Peering: FurrIX has reserved AS65320 for peering with members of
our exchange, we also have started to rework our peering policies along with reserving
AS65400-65500 for member BGP sessions and AS65501-AS6550 for peering with other
hobbyist networks.
Changes Proposed:
Eventually FurrIX would like to add a BGP looking glass to our network that is peered
with the Edge that will should all ASNs and routes on the exchange, but this is a ways
off for the moment.
Are exchange operations affected?
Everything is operating normally, this was just quiet work in the background in order to
mature the exchange a little further and get to a point that we are reaching some of our
goals that were set for this year.
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.