Running your own Autonomous System on the public internet sounds like something reserved for ISPs and large enterprises. It’s not. With sponsoring LIRs making AS numbers and IPv6 prefixes accessible to individuals, and FreeBSD providing the routing tools to make it work, you can announce your own address space to the Default-Free Zone from a single virtual machine.
This article walks through the complete setup: obtaining resources from RIPE via a sponsoring LIR, configuring a FreeBSD BGP router with FRR, building GRE/GIF tunnels to distribute prefixes to remote servers, and solving the routing challenge that arises when a server needs to speak from two different IPv6 address spaces simultaneously.
Note on addresses: All provider-assigned IP addresses, hostnames, and management IPs in this article have been replaced with RFC 5737 / RFC 3849 documentation ranges. My own AS number (AS201379) and prefix (2a06:9801:1c::/48) are public BGP resources and shown as-is. The upstream AS numbers (AS34927, AS209735) are equally visible in public routing tables.
Why Run Your Own AS ?
Provider-assigned IPv6 addresses are tied to that provider. Move to a different hoster and your addresses change - along with DNS records, firewall rules, reputation, and every system that references them. With your own AS and prefix, your addresses follow you. Migrate a server, update a tunnel endpoint, and traffic flows again without touching a single service configuration.
There are also less practical reasons. Understanding BGP transforms how you think about internet routing. Watching your prefix propagate through the DFZ and appear on looking glasses worldwide is genuinely satisfying. And if you run services across multiple providers, having provider-independent addressing simplifies the architecture considerably.
Obtaining Resources
To announce prefixes on the internet, you need two things from a Regional Internet Registry (in Europe, that’s RIPE NCC):
An AS number - your identity in BGP . Mine is AS201379 . An IPv6 prefix - the address space you’ll announce. I received 2a06:9801:1c::/48.
As an individual, you don’t need to become a RIPE member (which involves fees and bureaucracy). Instead, you work with a sponsoring LIR - an existing RIPE member who sponsors your resource registration. Several LIRs cater to hobbyists and small operators. The process typically involves:
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