Policy Routing

Sun Aug 26 04:39:40 UTC 2001

I would be very upset if I were "Company X" and I found out that you were
policy-routing my traffic to the "cheap" connection vs the best
connection.

Is it just me or do others on the list believe that in the absence of full
disclosure this would be shady at best?

---
John Fraizer
EnterZone, Inc

On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Jeff Cates wrote:

> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am a network engineer at a regional southeast USA
> NSP. I am looking for some recommendations concerning
> a scenario that has been presented to me.
> 
> My company is attempting to obtain company X's
> Internet transit traffic, which will be  BGP-4 peering
> over either a T-3 or OC-3. Due to financial reasons,
> my upper management has proposed that I route company
> X's Internet traffic via a specific NSP that we peer
> with, we'll call them NSP-A. Apparently, NSP-A has a
> substantially cheaper rate than our other upstrem
> providers and it is anticipated that this customer
> will be sending a full T3 or OC-3's worth of traffic
> to us.
> 
> Redirecting inbound traffic to company X via NSP-A can
> be accomplished very easily through use of AS path
> prepending, however, coming up with a solution for
> egress traffic from company X to NSP-A, via our AS,
> has proven a bit more challenging :-).
> 
> The only feasible solution that I've been able to come
> up with is to stick customer X directly on the router
> that peers with NSP-A and employ the use of policy
> routing, which would enable me to set the next hop for
> company X's traffic to the peering address on NSP-A.
> 
> Our NSP-A peering router is a Cisco 12016, running IOS
> 12.0(16)S2 and it has 256MB of DRAM. 
> 
> Additionally, it is configured with NetFlow and dCEF
> switching.
> 
> I've never employed policy routing in this type of
> environment and I am concerned about the overhead that
> it might place on the router or on the traffic
> traversing the interface.
> 
> I've also thought about MPLS TE, however, our core
> backbone does not run MPLS and even if we did, I
> believe I would still have to policy route the traffic
> to NSP-A once the MPLS label was popped off the last
> router in the path in transit to the NSP-A peering
> router.
> 
> Any ideas or comments would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Jeff
> 
> catesjl9394 at yahoo.com
> 
> 
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