IXP Manager on Ubuntu 24.04 by cloudimg

IXP Manager is the open source platform that operates an Internet Exchange Point. Developed by INEX and in production at over 250 exchanges worldwide, it is the system exchange operators use to run the day to day business of peering: onboarding members, allocating ports and addresses, generating device configuration and publishing the statistics members care about.

What it does

IXP Manager manages your members and their peering ports, your IXP LAN and VLAN addressing, your switches, patch panels and colocated equipment. It generates route server, route collector and switch configuration from that single source of truth, so the devices on your exchange fabric always match the database. It builds IRRDB based prefix and AS path filters from RIPE, RADB and the other registries, publishes peering matrices and peer to peer traffic statistics, exports the IX-F member list that peering databases consume, and gives every member a self service portal for their own ports, sessions and graphs.

What this image gives you

This image installs a pinned upstream IXP Manager release on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the full stack already wired together: Apache with PHP 8.4, MySQL 8 as the database and memcached as the cache. The database schema is migrated and seeded with the upstream reference data, so the first page you reach is a working sign in rather than an installer, and a placeholder exchange identity is in place so every screen is populated while you replace it with your own.

Secure by default

No usable credential ships in the image. On first boot the VM generates a fresh Laravel application key, a fresh database password and a fresh administrator password, all unique to that machine, and writes them to a root only file. The build time secrets are overwritten with random values that are generated, used once and discarded, so no image and no person holds a working login for your VM.

IXP Manager enforces two factor authentication on administrator accounts, and no enrolment is baked into the image: the first sign in requires the operator to enrol their own authenticator app before anything else is reachable, so the second factor is genuinely theirs alone. MySQL and memcached are bound to the loopback interface, so the database and cache are never exposed off the VM, and the web server refuses to serve the environment file that holds your secrets.

Support and licensing

IXP Manager is free and open source software published by INEX under the GNU General Public License version 2.0. There is no licence fee and no key to enter. The cloudimg charge covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support.

A step by step deployment guide covering first boot, the compulsory two factor enrolment, replacing the placeholder identity with your own exchange, putting TLS in front of the portal and the security recommendations is published at cloudimg.co.uk.