BGP and anycast

Tue Jan 30 17:58:21 UTC 2001

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001 hardie at equinix.com wrote:

>   One potential problem with using shared unicast addresses is that
>   routers forwarding traffic to them may have more than one available
>   route, and those routes may, in fact, reach different instances of
>   the shared unicast address.  Because UDP is self-contained, UDP
>   traffic from a single source reaching different instances presents
>   no problem.  TCP traffic, in contrast, may fail or present

That should be a little more precise.

TCP packets can not (for all practical purposes when dealing with "normal"
clients) be self contained.

UDP packets are self contained, from the network view.

But that does not mean that a particular protocol implemented on top of
UDP will necessarily still be self contained, merely that it is possible
for it to be.