Automating BGP peerings in the dn42 environment

dn42 (decentralized network 42) is a community-driven overlay network over the Internet, it provides a testbed aimed at experimenting with Internet protocols such as BGP, IPv4 and v6, DNS, that can be used to skill-up, develop new ideas, or interconnect your local hackerspace(s) in a proper network without NAT.

Think of it as a real-world lab where you can break things without taking down the Internet, with over a thousand routes, traffic exchanged, real-life links and latencies and actual peers around the world.

This talk covers:

• A quick introduction to dn42
• How I've set up my network (AS4242420263, aka "Flip Flap Network"), in different geographic zones using Ansible, Debian, WireGuard and Bird.
• my automatic peering service, dn42-sshd-autopeer, essentially a custom CLI over SSH, allowing other fellow network enthusiasts to request and set up a BGP peering session within a few minutes.

Developed in Python under MIT license, this service has permitted my network to grow to the top 25 of dn42 networks by number of BGP peers and graph centrality.