Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Changing ISP?
From: Graham Toal <gtoal () UTPA EDU>
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 10:47:12 -0500
-- Money's an issue. You want survivability in case something goes wrong with an individual provider, but if you're buying from a top of the line provider, you're willing to assume than an outage (if one occurs), will be brief, and you just don't want to be COMPLETELY off the air during that time if that happens. In that case, you do something like buy a comfortably sized connection from the so-called tier one, but back it up with a (perhaps smaller) connection from a discount provider. Your capabilities are less, but so are your costs.
One scenario worth considering here: assume you're doing this "on cheap" and won't have anywhere near the capacity on your backup line to do regular business - what services are critical? My guess, mostly just email. So set up a second IP address on the ether interface of your mail server (or better, add a second card) and hook that up to a single static IP from a cable or DSL provider (about $100/mo?); then set up a backup MX record for your mail server to point to that second IP address. When your main network goes down, you will still receive incoming mail. You may need to manually reconfigure your mail server to send outgoing mail via that interface, or you might be able to come up with some clever hack to do it automatically. Cheap & nasty, but saves your ass from the most common complaint, which is lost email. Doing the same for web is much more complex and involves major hassles with primary/secondary DNS. Allowing people on campus to use a low-bandwidth backup in emergencies - somehow prioritizing certain people's access to it - is a complex problem with expensive solutions - so much so in fact that I doubt you'd even try if all you have is a cheap DSL backup connection. G
Current thread:
- Changing ISP? John Kaftan (Oct 04)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Changing ISP? Winders, Timothy A (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Joe St Sauver (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Graham Toal (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Valdis Kletnieks (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Samuel Young (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? John Kaftan (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? David Gillett (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Graham Toal (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Valdis Kletnieks (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Samuel Young (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Brian Friday (Oct 04)
- Re: Changing ISP? Rob Whalen (Oct 13)