[BBLISA] Telecommunications Recommendations...

[Rob Taylor]

Hi Doc. BGP is Border Gateway Protocol. It is the core routing protocol
on the Internet. It allows you to advertise your network to your
upstream providers, provides redundancy for you network, and allow you
to make intelligent routing decisions about your outbound traffic.

Depending on how it is implemented, it can require some beefy hardware
to run on to process the large routing tables that the internet is
comprised of. In your case, you might be able to do it with less, if you
only really want it to advertise your networks via multiple paths. You
could probably use a floating static route to make all your outbound
traffic take one link unless that link was down, and then fail over to
the other one.

I'm not an ISP guy, so someone else out there could probably give you
more insight on using BGP. It's not trivial to setup though.

I would guess an issue with dual wan routers is the different IP
address's that both external interfaces would have. If you use NAT, then
outbound traffic shouldn't be much of an issue, as it could just get
NAT'ed to the other link(sessions going at the time of the cutover will
break when that happens), but inbound might be.

I would guess that you could have off-site dns with a low ttl, and have
it give one of IP's of either wan interface, and when one fails, update
it to use the other interface.

Anyone have any other ideas on how to do it?

rgt


On 07/14/2010 12:46 PM, Richard 'Doc' Kinne wrote:
> Folks:
> 
> I wanted to respond with thanks regarding the responses I got for my
> requests for "telecommunications recommendations."
> 
> I'll say that FIOS is not an option here in West Cambridge. I think my
> Director would die and go to heaven if I could get him FIOS, but not
> in this lifetime apparently.
> 
> You folks basically were able to clue me in that the difference
> between the DS1 and Comcast was the SLA. That was valuable. Comcast
> business service didn't even know what an SLA was, interestingly
> enough.
> 
> Daniel's thought on having two input streams coming into the building
> and managing them via a "twin" or "dual" WAN router was very
> interesting. I'm looking at such WAN routers now.
> 
> Both Daniel and K.M. Peterson spoke of "BGPs" in terms of advertising
> routes. I have to say that I've not encountered the term "BGP" before
> along that line. What is it?
> 
> Finally, David, your post regarding availability (loved the numbers!)
> and potential port blocking was an important point.
> 
> At this point it looks like I can get and keep my current service, but
> get it discounted by about 20%. This savings will enable me to add the
> Comcast pipeline all for less than what we pay now. This will enable
> us to have what we want and safely test the reliability of Comcast
> over the long term.
> 
> Thanks again, folks! The BBLISA list has, and continues to be, a
> critical resource which is invaluable to me, and I'm sure to many
> others as well!
> ----
> Doc Kinne
> AAVSO
> (From the Gmail Web Interface)
> 
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