[NANOG] OSPF minutia, and, technote publication venues

Tue May 6 02:03:30 UTC 2008

On 5 May 2008, at 21:49, Nathan Ward wrote:

> On 6/05/2008, at 1:21 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
>
>> On 5 May 2008, at 20:50, Nathan Ward wrote:
>>
>>> Perhaps what would make more sense here is Foundry (F5, etc.)
>>> building
>>> an anycast feature - anycast prefixes are withdrawn when a cluster
>>> relying on that anycast prefix goes below a threshold.
>>
>> I'm not sure exactly what feature is required, here. f5s of my
>> acquaintance are already very capable of making OSPF LSAs based on
>> virtual servers' pools being non-empty. Do it on more than one f5 in
>> the same area, and you're anycasting service availability with the
>> current feature set.
>
> Can they do it with BGP for Internet anycast?

They run ZebOS for routing stuff, so I would say so, although I  
haven't tried. In our application the covering supernets are  
synthesised as aggregates based on the presence of the OSPF /32.

>> The general reason why people prefer to find alternative solutions
>> rather than use dedicated load-balancers are that the dedicated load-
>> balancers are hellishly more expensive than the $5 gigabit switch
>> you probably already have in your garage.
>
> The dedicated load balancers also talk BGP (well, ones I've played
> with), so that does away with the need for a BGP speaking router.

There is a certain keenness to keep the peering edge free of multi- 
function boxes in some sandboxes I have played in.

I can't say I would be tremendously enthusiastic about the idea of  
using an (say) f5 BigIP 6800 as a peering router (not that I've tried  
and failed, or anything; for all I know it would work just fine). But  
perhaps some of that religion has just rubbed off on me.

Joe