Re: [NANOG] OSPF minutia, and, technote publication venues

[Joe Abley <jabley () ca afilias info>]

On 5 May 2008, at 21:49, Nathan Ward wrote:

> On 6/05/2008, at 1:21 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
>
> > On 5 May 2008, at 20:50, Nathan Ward wrote:
> >
> > > Perhaps what would make more sense here is Foundry (F5, etc.)
> > > building
> > > an anycast feature - anycast prefixes are withdrawn when a cluster
> > > relying on that anycast prefix goes below a threshold.
> >
> > I'm not sure exactly what feature is required, here. f5s of my
> > acquaintance are already very capable of making OSPF LSAs based on
> > virtual servers' pools being non-empty. Do it on more than one f5 in
> > the same area, and you're anycasting service availability with the
> > current feature set.
>
> Can they do it with BGP for Internet anycast?

They run ZebOS for routing stuff, so I would say so, although I  
haven't tried. In our application the covering supernets are  
synthesised as aggregates based on the presence of the OSPF /32.

> > The general reason why people prefer to find alternative solutions
> > rather than use dedicated load-balancers are that the dedicated load-
> > balancers are hellishly more expensive than the $5 gigabit switch
> > you probably already have in your garage.
>
> The dedicated load balancers also talk BGP (well, ones I've played
> with), so that does away with the need for a BGP speaking router.

There is a certain keenness to keep the peering edge free of multi- 
function boxes in some sandboxes I have played in.

I can't say I would be tremendously enthusiastic about the idea of  
using an (say) f5 BigIP 6800 as a peering router (not that I've tried  
and failed, or anything; for all I know it would work just fine). But  
perhaps some of that religion has just rubbed off on me.


Joe

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