Traffic Engineering (fwd)

Avi Freedman freedman at netaxs.com
Thu Sep 18 23:50:55 UTC 1997


> P.S.: Curtis Villamizar had another interesting approach
>       which involved pushing content far afield to
>       machines with the same transport-layer (IP)
>       addresses, relying upon closest-exit routing to 
>       connect one to the topologically-closest replication
>       machine.  Unfortunately, while this could be really
>       cool for NSPs to offload stuff towards peering
>       points (public or private), it also has some poor
>       scaling properties and is uncomfortably reliant
>       upon the stability of routing.
> 
>       If he's done any more thinking about the idea,
>       I'd love to hear about it though.

I don't know about Curtis, but others have solved this problem
(in theory) recently.  

We at Net Access have figured out a way (we believe) to get
around the stability-of-routing issue for already-established
TCP sessions in the above approach (multiple machines with the
same IP externally, plus an internally different IP, each
running gated to announce their /32(s) to your IGP) -
hint: a question I asked on NANOG a few days back -
And Alec Peterson (now of Erols) has figured out an even 
arguably slicker way to do it.

I'll see if Merit wants to have Alec and I do a presentation
on the methods @ NANOG.

We should be able to implement our various solutions by then...

Avi




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