Multihoming - Resilience or Independence

In message <20011010124248.Z16960 at Space.Net>, Gert Doering writes:
>Hi,
>
>On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 12:04:23PM +0200, Nipper, Arnold wrote:
>> there are a lot of reasons why customers want to be multi-homed. And what
>> I'm seeing here is, that the ISP community is not able to offer such a
>> service. But instead of blaming the "stupid" customers, ISP should go home
>> and make their homework.
>
>So what should "their homework be", then?  BGP has its limitations, and
>there are no other WAN routing protocols yet that *would* work with 
>ever-increasing table size and topology complexity.

I have been monitoring IPv6 for exactly this point:  how do IPv6 propose
to give people redundancy/ressilience.

So far I have not seen anybody really say "this is how it should be done".

The best I have been able to gather is that it is expected that end
customers assign multiple IP# to their servers and leave the selection
to the DNS and the other end.  I don't know if the "anycast" idea
was part of this solution but right now I certainly don't see any
other solution than DNS.

My current advice to my customers are therefore: Multiple IP# per
server, use DNS for load-balancing.

I certainly think that in europe BGP-confederations can be a partial
interrim solution, I can't see why we shouldn't be able to make one
centered on the local IX'es for instance, but it would take actual
will and interest from the local ISPs, and that would require
market-demand...

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.