During the last week of February, France-IX's managing director, Franck Simon, went to Zabljak, Montenegro, to take part in the Information Technology Week.

Invited by the Internet Society, Franck Simon shared his knowledge on how to build and grow an internet exchange point with an audience composed of regional academics and ISPs.

In the previous couple of years, Franck Simon already managed AXIS trainings to help Guinea and Comoros build their own internet exchanges.

A maintenance operation has been performed this month to upgrade the route servers infrastructure. The Bird software has been upgraded and new features have been implemented:

• An AS-SET is now available for members connected to the RS : AS51706:AS-MEMBERS:AS-PAR-RS and AS51706:AS-MEMBERS:AS-MRS-RS;
• ADD-PATH feature is supported;
• BGP extended communities is supported;
• Well-known communities are not interpreted by the route-servers and are propagated to all peers;
• Additional BGP communities are configured to be able to prepend member's routes coming from a specific partner IXP (it was previously only possible member by member and not globally by IXP) .

During this maintenance, routes servers have been connected directly on core switches : this reduces the risk of impact if an issue occurs on France-IX IT infrastructure.