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June 2026: the first member BGP session

A member's own router peered with us and announced its own prefix, end to end, for the first time. The looking glass was rebuilt, and the site stopped asking anyone for money.

Written up afterwards

Written in September 2026 from our session notes and commit history, and dated to the end of the period it covers.

What shipped

14 Jun: a member router on the global table. For the first time, a member's own router peered with one of our hubs over BGP and announced its own address block. Getting there turned up four bugs (a blocked port, a missing default route, an internal range leaking into announcements, and an incomplete sample config), and all four are fixed, so the next person gets it working first time.

14 Jun: the looking glass, rebuilt. A retro-terminal console anyone can use, showing live routes and hub health, linked from the main navigation. It replaced a tool that had quietly become unreachable.

21 Jun: nothing for sale. While sorting out business registration, we removed every payment and donation ask from the site. Basic is free for everyone; Plus and Pro are switched on individually. The same day brought a dedicated plans page, a one-form signup, and one visual style across the homepage, wiki and looking glass. The forum stayed up but was no longer linked everywhere, since the conversation had moved elsewhere.

Also in June:

  • IPsec behind CGNAT. Several days of bench testing an IPsec option for members behind carrier-grade NAT. An early test said it couldn't work; going back over it showed a configuration slip, not a real limit, and per-member keys now work through NAT on real hardware. Not a product yet, but no longer a dead end.
  • Monitoring consolidated. Two monitoring stacks had drifted apart. There's now one, with a crashed collector repaired and the hub graphs fixed.
  • The homepage rewritten to say plainly what Nekotopia does, with analytics behind a proper cookie-consent banner.
  • A bogon-filtering feed scoped for members running BGP. Planned, not live.

What broke, and what we fixed

  • A routing leak between two hubs. A change made while building the looking glass leaked an internal route overnight and broke connectivity between two hubs. Monitoring caught it, we reverted it, and the code that made the mistake possible was changed so it can't happen the same way again.
  • Paused hubs that looked live. Three regional hubs had been paused to save money but were still recorded as active. The records now match reality.
  • We'd blocked Google. An over-broad bot rule had been blocking Google's crawler and tag verifier for weeks. Narrowed.

By the numbers

98 changes to the platform repository in June.