Looking glass

The Nekotopia Looking Glass is an operator-style window into our BGP fabric. You connect over telnet or SSH, drop into a restricted shell that wraps the birdc CLI, and inspect the live route table of the route server peering with every regional hub. It's read-only — you can't change anything from inside — but you can see exactly which nColo prefixes are alive on which hub, the state of each iBGP session, and the AS-path / next-hop / preference of every route in the fabric.

If you've used lg.he.net or route-views.routeviews.org, this is the same idea, scoped to Nekotopia's own prefixes.

What you can see

• Every active nColo allocation that's been announced via BGP, with the originating hub, customer ASN, and the route's session state.
• iBGP session health between the route server and every Nekotopia hub.
• Live route table filtered to Nekotopia's three pools: 185.24.72.0/22 (Singapore + future APAC), 185.65.116.0/24 (London + future EMEA), 193.143.16.0/23 (nSolo BYOIP).

What you can't see, deliberately:

• The human owner of any prefix. Only the prefix itself, the hub, and the customer ASN. (If you want your username surfaced as the BGP description string, raise it with the admin — opt-in, not v1.)
• Anything outside the Nekotopia pools. The route server's input filter rejects routes outside 185.24.72.0/22, 185.65.116.0/24, 193.143.16.0/23.
• Customer-side BGP session detail (their CPE's view). The looking glass sees only what the hub side learns.

How to connect

Two protocols, both anonymous — no account, no key, just connect.

telnet (port 23 — recommended for the retrocomputing vibe):

telnet lg.ring.nekotopia.io

SSH (port 2222 — modern, encrypted, same shell):

ssh -p 2222 lg@lg.ring.nekotopia.io
# (just press Enter at the password prompt — empty password is correct)

Both drop you straight into the looking-glass shell. The username and password are documented, public, by design. The shell is a tightly-scoped command interpreter; you cannot escape to a real shell or modify anything.

lg.ring.nekotopia.io resolves on the Torus mesh DNS, so you need an active Torus tunnel to reach it. A public-internet endpoint (lg.nekotopia.io) is on the roadmap.

Commands

Type help or ? to list these inside the shell.

Command	What it shows
show status	BIRD daemon version, uptime, last config reload
show protocols	List of all peers + their state (Established / Connect / Active / Idle)
show protocols all <name>	Detailed peer info: capabilities, hold timer, source address, route counters
show route	The whole route table
show route for <prefix>	Routes matching a specific prefix (e.g. show route for 185.24.74.0/29)
show route protocol <name>	Routes learned from one specific peer
show route where <expr>	Filter via BIRD's filter language (e.g. show route where net ~ [185.65.116.0/24+])
show route all	Verbose detail on every route
show symbols, show memory	BIRD internals
exit / quit / logout	Disconnect

Example session

$ telnet lg.ring.nekotopia.io
Trying 10.255.9.241...
Connected to lg.ring.nekotopia.io.
Escape character is '^]'.

================================================================
  Welcome to lg.nekotopia.io — Nekotopia Looking Glass
  Read-only BGP view of the Nekotopia fabric.
  Type "help" for commands. Type "exit" to disconnect.
================================================================

lg> show protocols
BIRD 2.14 ready.
Name                    Proto    Table   State        Since   Info
device1                 Device   ---     up           …
kernel4                 Kernel   master4 up           …
hub_eu_west_2           BGP      ---     up           …       Established
hub_ap_southeast_1      BGP      ---     up           …       Established

lg> show route for 185.24.74.0/29
… (route detail, next-hop, AS path, etc.)

lg> exit
bye.

How the route server works (briefly)

A small BIRD2 daemon on 10.255.9.241 peers iBGP with every regional hub. It's in the same AS as the hubs (64512), so customer-eBGP routes are reflected to the looking glass via the hub's normal route-reflector mechanism. Routes outside the three Nekotopia pools are filtered out on import. The looking glass announces nothing back — it's a pure sink.

Static-mode nColo allocations (the "no BGP, simpler setup" mode) currently don't appear in the looking glass — their routes live in the hub's main routing table but aren't redistributed into BGP. That's a known gap we're working on. BGP-mode allocations are fully visible.

When new hubs come online they're automatically added to the route server's peer list. When they're removed, the corresponding peer is torn down.

Why it exists

Two reasons.

Transparency. When you stand up a nColo prefix, you can see your own announcement land in the fabric — visible to anyone, verifiable independently of the dashboard. That's a trust signal that's hard to fake.

Because it's cool. A real operator looking glass is the kind of detail that distinguishes a serious network from a marketing site. Nekotopia is a serious network. The looking glass is one of the small details that makes that legible to the people who care.

Related

• nColo — the routed-prefix add-on whose announcements you'll see here
• nSolo — single-IP add-on; the 193.143.16.0/24 pool is also visible
• Torus tiers — what you need to subscribe to in order to have a prefix in the looking glass