Problem

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