Over the years, PeeringDB has become the defacto source of where networks providers list their presence, and willingness to interconnect/peer with others. It's an invaluable directory and we encourage networks to list themselves here, if they are involved in peering and interconnection. INX lists all the Internet exchange points, as well as their specific points of presence here, to help operators choose which sites are interesting to colocate at.
We use PeeringDB to bootstrap our provisioning process (ie. we populate our database with information that peers publish in PeeringDB.com). In particular, we capture the contact information, IRR Object, and max-prefixes that the peer has made available to the PeeringDB community. We do not insist that peers have a PeeringDB record, but do encourage this, and can assist peers in setting this up.
Furthermore, we publish nightly updates to PeeringDB that include a peer's IP addresses, port speed, and whether, or not, they are a BGP-RS peer. Peers that select the "Allow IXP update", as part of their PeeringDB account, will automatically have this information updated by us.
PeeringDB has very good documentation about what peeringDB is and how to setup your account. Go to https://docs.peeringdb.com for their documentation and visit the Howtos here https://docs.peeringdb.com/howtos/
What does this mean for you as a network?
Whenever a peering session is setup, networks use the information published on peeringdb to generate configuration for the BGP session. This means that your peeringDB information must be up to date.
After you log into peeringDB and click on the network you are going to edit you will come up with a screen something like this.
The first few fields are fairly self explanatory
Organization, Also Known As, Long Name, Company Website and ASN.
The fields we going to focus on in the left column are: IRR as-set/route-set and IPv4 Prefixes and IPv6 prefixes.
IRR as-set is the IRR object that is used to generate a prefix list to know what prefixes you will be advertising across your BGP session.
The IPv4 Prefixes and IPv6 prefix fields are often used by peers to determine the max-prefix count they should setup on session.
Some networks will use that exact number while others may add some fat in by increasing that number by say 20%.
The other important information to keep up to date is the exchange point information.
In the right had column is which exchange points you are connected to and the IP address information you have been allocated for that exchange.
When you connect to an exchange it is important to update this information. Again this information like IP address is used to build the BGP configuration.
To help you keep your IXP information up to date in your peeringdb profile you can check the tickbox further down the page on the left “Allow IXP Update”
A Note on Contact information.
Contact information is mandatory for networks with a connection to an Internet Exchange.
Contact information is fairly self explanatory however you do want to add the correct information to direct queries correctly.
Networks use peeringDB contact information to request peering and when there are routing issues they will probably look for a NOC contact so your NOC contact details like an email address should probably go to your NOC or core team of engineers. It is typically a high level issue that needs some urgency to be fixed so it should get more priority than an average customer and put into the support queue.
Saying that, it does depend on the network you run. Maybe peering requests and routing issues are standard everyday support tickets.
