Re: multi homing pressure

[John Payne <john () sackheads org>]

On Oct 19, 2005, at 12:20 PM, Todd Vierling wrote:

> Many customers would rather not multihome directly, and prefer "set  
> it and
> forget it" connectivity.  It's much easier to maintain a multi-pipe
> connection that consists of one static default route than a pipe to  
> multiple
> carriers.  The former requires simple physical pipe management,  
> which can be
> left alone for 99% of the time.  The latter requires BGP feed, an  
> ASN, and
> typically much more than 1% of an employee's time to keep running  
> smoothly.

Hrm, people keep saying that BGP is hard and takes time.

As well as my end-user-facing network responsibilities, I also have  
corporate network responsibilities here.  All of our corporate hub  
locations are multi-homed (or soon will be)... and I honestly can't  
remember the last time I made any changes (besides IOS upgrades) to  
BGP configs for the 2 hubs in the US.  (We're moving physical  
locations in the "international" hubs and taking new providers, so  
I'm discounting those changes as you'd have similar changes in a  
single homed statically routed move).

If you don't have multihoming requirements other than availability  
then it really can be fire and forget.