Do you want to connect to SFMIX in the Bay Area? Here’s how:

Overview

• Review Pricing Information
• Review and confirm you meet the Administrative, Logistical, and Technical requirement sections of this guide
• Send an email to tech-c@sfmix.org to:
  • State your interest in connecting with a desired speed and Location
  • An SFMIX administrator will confirm that there are available ports at your requested speed and location.
• Fill out the Membership Application Form
• SFMIX will issue an LOA/CFA authorization document for a new cross-connection link to be ordered, by you, with the datacenter operator
• SFMIX will allocate you an IPv4 and IPv6 address that you can configure on your router.
• The datacenter operator and SFMIX will connect your new circuit(s) to the exchange in a Quarantine VLAN
  • This gives you and SFMIX a safe place to experiment with getting your link up and your router configuration in place before interacting with the production peering VLAN
  • Any installation or turn-up questions should be sent to tech-c@sfmix.org
• Once you and SFMIX are confident in your configuration and readiness, SFMIX will move your port to be placed in the production VLAN.
• Begin passing traffic to other participants and enjoy!

Administrative Requirements

• Pricing
  • SFMIX began charging annual membership fees in 2017 (after over a decade of free service to the community). The fees were revised in late 2022 to adjust for inflation and growing infrastructure costs. As of 2023, the fees are:
    • $995/year for a single 1Gbit/s port (multiples of 1Gbps are discouraged, instead a 10G port should be used, potentially with a rate limit)
    • $2995/year for for each 10Gbit/s port (maximum of 4 ports in a link-aggregation bundle)
    • $7495/year for each 100Gbit/s port (no restrictions on quantity for link-aggregation)
  • Exemptions to these fees are made on a case-by-case basis and subject to approval by the SFMIX board.
    • Typically, exemptions are granted to non-profit entities that contribute an in-kind service of equal value to all other participants.
    • Examples of this are ccTLD/gTLD servers, root DNS server operators, or global routing debugging and performance measurement tools with public interfaces.
    • Questions and requests may be sent to tech-c@sfmix.org
• Billing
  • Billing is performed on an annual basis – generally at the beginning of the calendar year, monthly billing is not available.
  • All pricing is in US dollars.
  • Invoices may be paid by (in decreasing order of preference):
    • An ACH transfer
    • A wire transfer
    • A mailed paper check
    • A credit card

Logistical Requirements

• Participants are required to have at least one organization representative subscribed to the sfmix-members mailing list.
  Role accounts that broadcast to multiple humans are encouraged for wide advertisement of any planned or unscheduled work. Please email tech-c@sfmix.org with all subscription requests.
• Correspondence or discussions on the SFMIX mailing lists are considered confidential to participants, members, and sponsors.
• SFMIX is a non-profit, all volunteer-run organization. No SLA or service guarantees are implied – all services are considered best effort.
• Participants may only peer at a single location, regardless of the number of physical or logical ports.
  The SFMIX peering fabric is built on significant donated connectivity, physical space, power, and additional infrastructure, with the express intention of operating as a peering fabric and not a transport or carrier replacement.
• Participants may not spoof ARP or ICMPv6 packets, or sniff traffic between other participants

Technical Requirements

• SFMIX only supports single-mode fiber media types. No copper or multi-mode fiber media types are supported.
• Participants must utilize an ASN (Autonomous System Number) that is allocated by an RIR (Regional Internet Registry), such as ARIN.
  Private or reserved ASN’s are not acceptable – as specified by RFC 1930 or RFC 6996.
• For each logical link into the SFMIX exchange, only one source MAC address is allowed to be sourced.
  SFMIX uses port security features with a limit of 2 MAC addresses to allow participants to switch their routers easily without coordination.
  However, no more than one MAC address is allowed on long time scales.
• The only acceptable broadcast protocols are ARP (for IPv4 neighbor discovery) and ICMPv6 Neighbor Discovery (for IPv6 Neighbor Discovery)
  All other broadcast traffic (e.g., ICMPv6 RAs, CDP, LLDP, DHCP, or STP) are forbidden.
• All participants are required to setup a BGP session with the SFMIX Looking Glass server.
  This service is utilized purely for debugging purposes; no routes are reflected back out, and no traffic is exchanged over this peering session.
• Participants must not allow SFMIX production VLAN subnets to propagate externally from their network and should minimize internal propagation as much as able.
  If a participant’s network beyond their SFMIX-connected edge router(s) can reach the SFMIX subnet addresses (206.197.187.0/24 and 2001:504:30::/64), ACLs are requested in order to prevent this.
• Participants may not point any static or default routes towards other participants, or otherwise use another participant’s or SFMIX’s resources without permission
• Participants are encouraged to utilize the SFMIX route servers, where appropriate for their organization traffic engineering policies.
  These peering relationships help facilitate creating immediate value for new members of the exchange. No MLPA or peering with the route servers is required.