[BBLISA] Telecommunications Recommendations...

[Bill Bogstad]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 1:22 PM, Rob Taylor <rgt at wi.mit.edu> wrote:
> 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.

With manual or automatic failover...

> 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.

While the above is technically correct, in his circumstance BGP is not
an option.   To do BGP you TYPICALLY need to
own your IP address space in order to be able to advertise them
successfully.  He's talking about how many addresses his provider is
going to give him so he doesn't have such addresses.

Second, the address space he's talking about is so small that even if
he does get addresses and providers who will do BGP, no one else will
pay attention to his advertisements anyway.   Each advertisement takes
up expensive memory in core Internet routers and the larger network
providers aren't going to spend lots of money so he can have redundant
network providers.  Don't go there.

Bill Bogstad