Redundant BGP for lower cost

Alex Thurlow alex at blastro.com
Fri Mar 5 16:46:23 UTC 2010


I have to say that this looks like a nice solution to me, and I've 
definitely had many people point me to OSPF.  One problem is that I've 
never run OSPF before.  Some googling brings of a few results on 
implementation, but can someone recommend a good place to look or a book 
to get to really get it all figured out?

Thanks,
Alex


On 3/4/2010 11:23 AM, Jack Carrozzo wrote:
> If you want to keep it cheap, roll out another Quagga edge - one to 
> each peer. Drop default into OSPF from both edges, iBGP over a GE 
> between them. If one toasts you'll only lose half your routes for 
> 1s-ish, or however long you set your OSPF keepalives.
>
> While you're at it, add extra fans and run the edge systems off solid 
> state disks or CF cards.
>
> Or, buy $real hardware.
>
> -Jack Carrozzo
>
> On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Alex Thurlow <alex at blastro.com 
> <mailto:alex at blastro.com>> wrote:
>
>     Let me preface this by saying that I'm not a full time network
>     admin, but we're a small company and I'm the only one handling
>     this.  Our budget is also not huge, but we're at the point where
>     extended downtime would cost us enough money that we can spend
>     some money to fix the problem.
>
>      Here's my situation:  I have two providers, each handing me
>     gigabit ethernet.  I'm getting full BGP feeds and handling them
>     with a Linux/Quagga router.  We max out at about 100kpps, as we're
>     mostly pushing video which gives us a large packet size.  It works
>     fine, and I've been happy with it so far.  But, we've gotten to
>     the point where I want a backup router of some sort in case
>     something happens to that one, what with the fans and disks that
>     could fail.  I see a few options.
>
>     1. Just set up another Quagga box and use keepalived or some other
>     HA solution.
>     2. Buy a Cisco/Juniper/whatever and then have the Quagga box as
>     backup.
>     3. I have a 6500 behind the router that's just doing switching.
>      Could I have something switch that to static route all traffic to
>     one of my providers if something happened to the router?  The 6500
>     has Sup1A with MSFC2 running IOS native.
>
>     On the Cisco side, I see that we could probably run a 7200VXR with
>     NPE-G1 (about $6000 on ebay).  Moving to the Sup720, even used is
>     probably out of our price range.
>
>     What do you guys think I should use here?
>
>     Thanks,
>     Alex
>
>
>



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