Re: Emergency backup for a small net

["Kent W. England" <kwe () 6SigmaNets com>]

At 10:49 PM 18-05-97 +0800, Miguel A.L. Paraz wrote:
> What I would advocate here - though it is probably less feasible in
> the North American context - is application level multihoming.  For
> mail, backup MX'es for inbound, and smarthosts for outbound.  For 
> Web access, if the ISP operates a proxy cache for its customers, the
> customers' actual IP address becomes irrelevant.  There has been some
> discussion in the Squid users' mailing list about this, and we
> (the Squid contributors) are looking into means and ways of making
> upstream switchover more transparent.

And I would have the web servers addressed with overlays, using DNS to
switch between ISP addresses.

Another point; application level switching allows the routes to be
pre-established, leading to less delay, less route flapping, and better
maintenance.
> Granted, running caches in our part of the world (across the Pacific
> from MAE-West) is a must for reasonable performance at reasonable
> cost.

Even with HTTP 1.1, caches and mirrors are good performance enhancements
because no one point is close to every other point on the Net.

--Kent

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