Re: Multiple providers w/o BGP (was: Re: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices)

[John Fraizer <nanog () EnterZone Net>]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, Timothy Brown wrote:

> The company I work for has its offices in a building Cisco mostly occupies.
> There have been Arrowpoint engineering staff in and out all week getting
> badges for a move-in within the next 2-3 weeks.
>
> As an aside containing actual internet operational content, are there any
> pointers onna web to redundancy and load-balancing solutions NOT using BGP?
> I'm pretty much talking about two different providers with different
> addressing schemes trying to connect to a third party who is a customer of
> both providers, but who cannot justify a /20.   What are my primary options
> here for connectivity to the customer (short of adding three or four completely
> seperate production networks to the justification request)?
>
> Timothy Brown
> tcb () ga prestige net


Get an ASN. You need it and if you want to play in the big leagues, you
NEED it.

Get two, three, twenty upstreams and get address space from ONE (since you
can't qualify for you own yet.).  Get permission from that ONE to announce
a /?? out of their address space to the other providers (if they won't
allow this, don't even consider them as an upstream!!!) and (this is VERY
important) have them blast a hole in the prefix-list filters they use for
peers at their borders to allow announcements at the borders for the /??
you're assigned/allocated.

The reason it is important that they allow the announcements is that if
they don't, and your connection from them goes down, you lose connectivity
to them and ALL of their customers who are not multi-homed. (Ran into this
gotcha this weekend when one of our providers (to remane nameless
becaause they throw more money at laywers than engineers, consult
flap statistics for AS13944 if you're currious.) went tits-up nation-wide
TWO days in a row!

Beyond that, they might have absolutely crappy routes incoming to you and
you may very well not want to announce any routes to them, period, the
end, although as-path prepending ????? ????? ????? ????? ????? usually
will work.


Note: We have since requested that they blow a hole for our network in
their prefix-list filters on their borders.


---
John Fraizer
EnterZone, Inc