Chiappa blows his brains out (was Re: Policy Statement)

Mon Jan 29 22:56:19 UTC 1996

Joel_M_Snyder at Opus1.COM writes
> GIVEN that there exists some set of organizations who want to purchase
> multiple T1s from multiple independent suppliers for purposes of
> reliability and load sharing yet have need for less than 255 unique IP
> addresses, and GIVEN that certain extremely popular software products (such
> as Netscape Navigator) which are important to these organizations were
> developed by programmers who seem to have no knowledge of either efficiency
> or the way that the Internet works, and GIVEN that I have sufficient
> knowledge about routing as is necessary to fully understand every technical
> issue involved, and GIVEN that I have a rudimentary and imperfect
> understanding of the political and economic issues regarding IP numbering
> and the propagation of routes thereunto, HOW do I resolve the conflict
> between justifiable corporate service requirements and the expressed
> statements on these mailing lists the past few weeks which seem to imply
> that anyone who does not consume at least a /18 worth of address space is
> not worthy of being globally routed?  
> 
> I am asking, I suspect, not for a technical answer (there being none other
> than Chiappa's "it's gonna cost"), but the most politically correct answer
> to give the organization (which is not Netscape). 

You present a hard edge case that isn't particularly well met by the current
infrastructure and it can't necessarily be done well or even done at all.
(Sean's tricky chocolate-consulting hack excluded).  Probably the best
thing that be currently supported is getting two diverse connections to 
a single provider that can globally aggregate your network.  The connections 
should go to different POPs and should follow seperate physical paths.  
This should provide you the desired reliability and load sharing.

-scott