-----Original Message----- From: Paul A Vixie [SMTP:paul@vix.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 1997 11:35 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: multihoming without BGP

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The way I think of this is that BGP describes reachability, and clients need to know about topology in order to select the right web server, and these two (reachability and topology) are necessarily unrelated to each other.

I think that there is another important element or metric that is not served by either - packet loss across the path. You know a server is reachable - BGP tells you. If you know the topology, you know it is "close". But looking at a typical day at MAE East, for example, when you take into account the packets that end up being dropped, it may *not* be the 'best' path.

Rodney Joffe Chief Technology Officer Genuity Inc., a Bechtel company http://www.genuity.net