Problem
Joe Abley
jabley at isc.org
Sat Dec 20 22:27:09 UTC 2003
On 20 Dec 2003, at 05:26, pramod babu G wrote:
> What is the difference between Route Server and Route Reflector in
> terms of complecity of TCP connections.
> Is it that Route Reflectors are for IBGP and Route Server for both EBGP
> and IBGP.
The term "route reflector" appears in the standards documents in RFC
1996 and later in RFC2796, both of which are concerned with IBGP
things.
"Route server" is (in my experience) almost always used to describe an
EBGP thing, usually a means of implementing a multi-lateral peering
infrastructure at an exchange point.
"Looking glass" was the term used by Ed Kern in the cgi-script he ran
on nitrous which allowed the world at large to execute particular
commands on Digex routers. I don't know if other people used the term
before Ed did, but that's the first time I saw it.
Some route servers allow public telnet access, and provide looking
glass functionality as well as route server functionality. These days,
"route server" is frequently used to describe routers which provide
looking glass functionality, regardless of whether they propagate
routes between peers.
In practice "route reflector" and "route server" are frequently
interchanged, and if you are too pedantic in complaining about their
misuse people start to hate you (again, in my experience :-)
Joe
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