Running your own Autonomous System on the public internet was once the domain of ISPs and large enterprises, but it's now accessible to individuals through sponsoring LIRs and FreeBSD routing tools. This comprehensive guide demonstrates how to announce your own address space to the Default-Free Zone from a single virtual machine using FRR (Free Range Routing), GRE tunnels, and policy routing.

The article walks through obtaining resources from RIPE NCC 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 of servers needing to speak from multiple IPv6 address spaces simultaneously. All provider-assigned IP addresses are replaced with documentation ranges, while the author's public AS201379 and 2a06:9801:1c::/48 prefix are shown as-is.

Running your own AS provides provider-independent addressing that follows you across hosting providers, eliminating the need to update DNS records, firewall rules, and service configurations when migrating servers. Beyond practical benefits, understanding BGP transforms how you think about internet routing, and watching your prefix propagate through the DFZ and appear on looking glasses worldwide offers genuine satisfaction. For multi-provider service architectures, having provider-independent addressing significantly simplifies the overall design.