Re: Why doesn't BGP...

[Ed Morin <edm () halcyon com>]

Well, sure, but why should I _have_ to?  I thought we, in part, pay
the big bucks for routers that are supposed to figure some of this
stuff out on their own without having to "band-aid" things with AS
path manipulations, etc.

On Fri, 8 Nov 1996, Deepak Jain wrote:

> Can't you adjust your metrics/weights to prefer the low speed links less?
>
> -Deepak.
>
> On Fri, 8 Nov 1996, Ed Morin wrote:
>
> > With all the recent talk about BGP, etc., I thought I'd see if anybody
> > knows the reasoning behind a particular short-coming of BGP that I've
> > noticed and found particularly bothersome...
> >
> > We peer, using BGP, with several "backbone" provider networks for transit
> > purposes.  Some of these links are "faster" than others (e.g. T-3 vs.
> > multiple T-1 and single T-1) for various reasons.  If our router sees
> > a route to a particular destination via a "high-speed" link and a "low-
> > speed" link that has the _same_ number of AS "hops", it picks the link
> > with the "lowest" IP address!  (At least that's what I'm told and what
> > I observe...)
> >
> > Why doesn't BGP pick the link with the highest bandwidth, or, better
> > yet, pick the link with the highest bandwidth AND least congestion to
> > label as the "best" available route?  The needed information is avail-
> > able in the router (and if it was somebody doing BGP from a host that
> > was separate from the box with the interfaces, well, then too bad I
> > guess) and can't be _that_ hard to incorporate can it?
> >
> > I'll get off my soapbox now...
> >
> > Ed

Ed Morin
Northwest Nexus Inc. (206) 455-3505 (voice)
Professional Internet Services
edm () nwnexus WA COM

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