multihoming without BGP

Tue Jun 10 12:42:32 UTC 1997

: BGP isn't better.  You don't need BGP for multihoming.  My SF NANOG talk
: was on exactly this topic.  If you get a little bit of PA space from each
: provider, and run a multihomed server (or a whole pile of them) with the
: "interface default" mods we made available, you don't need BGP at all.

You are convinced that ifdefault is production quality? Your slides don't 
give me the feeling of absolute confidence. Is anyone using it in a 
production environment?

>From an operational standpoint BGP is what works, now. 

Also, your solution only works on servers running BSD/OS 2.1. What about 
other platforms where the source code is not available (How am I going to 
magically convert my SGI/NT boxes into BSD/OS 2.1?) What about other
clients from our end who still need redundant internet connectivity? 

DNS round robin is also a crude way to balance loads over network 
interfaces compared to path selection.

I am extremely skeptical that ifdefault is ready for prime time.

-Tung-Hui Hu
hhui at arcfour.com